


Striped Carnations

by Carnations3112, Hamletlvr69



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Angst, Artist Harry, Blood and Injury, Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Character Study, Denial of Feelings, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, Emotional Constipation, Eventual Romance, Extended Metaphors, F/M, Friendship, Hanahaki AU, Hanahaki Disease, Heavy Angst, Hogwarts, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Metaphors, Non-Consensual Touching, Panic Attacks, Past Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Pining, Pre-Slash, Romance, Self-Acceptance, Self-Harm, Slash, Slow Burn, Surprise Pairing, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:40:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 39,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22051912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carnations3112/pseuds/Carnations3112, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hamletlvr69/pseuds/Hamletlvr69
Summary: Harry dares to look down at the petal. It looks like someone tore apart his heart and splatted the blood across the pristine white bedsheets of Madam Pomfrey's. It looks like his childhood of scraped knees of split life. Of a feeling like a ghost afraid of the light anytime Aunt Petunia spoke his name. Of abuse. This petal of striped carnation looks like eyes of cognac in blood belonging to a pale man.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle, Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Harry Potter/Voldemort
Comments: 116
Kudos: 311





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer - We do not own the characters, everything belongs to J.K.Rowling.
> 
> BGM: 1. Unrequited Love (& other cliches) by Breakup Shoes.  
>  2\. The Irrepressibles - Two Men in Love (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFOsIwoKlVA&ab_channel=TheIrrepressibles)

Darkness makes him feel like swimming through blood thickened molasses-like he’s just clutching at doorways without learning to pick the locks. His heart pounds as he finds himself walking down the rock cold halls of the Ministry of Magic. His breathing quickens, he can feel his collar stick to his neck. He feels hollow, the kind that caves in under a bit of pressure. He knows what he will see now. He knows the veil all too well.

‘Nice one James’- rings sharp from his right and then he’s falling. He’s not a person anymore. He’s an amorphous audio blob of radio static. He’s an unraveling mitten abandoned in the snow. He feels like a slime mold.

A slowness, a stillness seeps into the evergreen needle of his bones. Cognac, it was cognac eyes that stared down at him. There were no blackbirds, no swift foxes but overlapped dark trees and white snow. The man looming over Harry made him feel like his skin was going to burst open at the seams. All life seeping into hungry Earth. It made him feel that the cold demons would fly out of his ribs and into the mountain caves where they belong, buried in muddy riverbeds, curled around wet stalactites, nested with newborn bats, anywhere but inside him.

He looked like a hungry ghost that dodged his stretched-thin shadows. He was built of substance and blood. Air and echoes - nothing more. Looking at his eyes made him feel like he would be swallowed whole. But Harry had to fight back, his eyes did not have peace, laughter, love in the armory of his blood-drenched eyes.

Harry felt like he had a trapped crow in his belly, beating to be freed for suddenly damage has taken up the face of a fawn wandering in the pine-forest fog, white-spotted, ice-steel glare, a rush of air under a blue jays wing as it hits off into the starry dark, bound for the moon.

On the contrary, Harry felt the living weight. Such a wild screaming weight, black-bodied and porous-boned. It was grappling his insides, to leave the shreds of his skin. Harry stared at his lips which looked purple either by the stain of death or by wine.

Then suddenly he was coughing. Bloody mouth and shaking hands, stomach aching as he wakes up from nightmares about cities falling into the sea for weeks. He coughs up a petal and his mouth tastes bitter of salt and iron, like fear, dust, fire, home, and battlefield.

He stares at his clenched palm, too terrified to open it. His heart stands knee-deep in the forest rivers. It beats loud, his mind running from the fleet-footed man with hair of vine and eyes of liquid scarlet sunsets. He feels of walking barefoot on the cracked glass looking for his heart on the ground, in its sharp-edged glory and musty wood of four Privet Drive. Harry is mismatched, a mistake and is mislead. He feels whole and apart and everything in between.

He dares to look down at the petal. It looks like someone tore apart his heart and splatted the blood across the pristine white bedsheets of Madam Pomfrey's. It looks like his childhood of scraped knees of split life. Of a feeling like a ghost afraid of the light anytime Aunt Petunia spoke his name. Of abuse. This petal of striped carnation looks like eyes of cognac in blood belonging to a pale man.

Harry knows the flower. He would recognize it in a heartbeat. Striped Carnation. He remembers Tom telling him about it. About the only plant, he watered back in his orphanage. About how the mistress plucked it out and called it a weed and how Tom set her on fire - the same colour of his eyes, the fire glowed - the same colour of the ruined flower.


	2. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are not dead...yet. Well, we did not specify which year we shall be posting, so consider us early!
> 
> here, a little more pain, for the painful times.
> 
> please listen to The Wisp sings by Winter Aid to get sadder.  
> https://link.tospotify.com/LQKCwW0qrbb

Harry lays awake staring at the ceiling Aunt Petunia has been trying to pacify Duddley over some times now and he knows he should get up. Harry wants to sleep forever instead, he has become the sort of dangerous sad that Dumbledore had promised that he would never be. Dumbledore had promised him of warmth but Harry knows he isn’t they expect him to save them. But from what? From whom? Voldemort? Or the arctic coldness that has been growing inside his heart and is spreading turning his blood too acidic. He wants to cry but he can’t, he feels like a jellyfish. He remembers Hermione saying how they don’t die but they simply cease to move. Glass moves like any other liquid but slower. He has started to solve five crosswords a day to stop him from panicking, but it does not stop the air that still aches to reach his lungs. He’s nothing but carbon and bad-timing and dead and decaying loved ones.

“Harry!” -- Aunt Petunia squawky voice makes Harry clamber out of his bed as a clammy sense of losing loved ones tries to hold onto him with a death grip. 

"Are you up yet? " She demands. 

"Nearly, " Says Harry. 

"Well, get a move, I want you to look after the bacon, " Harry groans. 

"Did I hear something from that mouth of yours? ", his aunt snaps through the door. 

" Nothing, nothing… "

"What a freak", Dudley drawls. 

Suddenly a sharp whistle rings from the out and Harry can not breathe. Hd has heard this shrill cacophony of whistle before and remembers not consciously running towards underground trenches. 

He feels hot and cold. He does not know what is happening to his body or why he is shaking all over. He does not know who he is or who he will be. He wants to sleep inside of nothingness without being annihilated. He feels perhaps what an exploding star would feel like. He opens his eyes to the world of shattered grey and war cries. 

“Get to the trenches. It’s blitz. Get to the trenches. Chop chop boys!”

He stares up at the man shouting, he has a pale face and shaky hands holding a cigarette. There’s just too much noise. Running footsteps and of cosmic blasts.  
“Move Freak or you will blow up,” suddenly Harry is pushed to the ground as a lanky boy with grubby clothes run past him. He wants to scream, yell, - shut up, shut up, shut up - but his mouth is shut, a tight-pressed line keeping a wildfire on the inside. His heart is not in his throat. It is pounding too hard, secure in his chest.

‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die’ he keeps on chanting as he tries to stand-up and stares at his own hands. His hands are not his own but he knows the taste of dirt and pain, He knows the insanity that burns in his veins that screams ‘Rip, tear, burn’. He wonders how far his bones will bend before they break.

‘Tom’, someone shouts, ‘Tom get out of the place, they are going to blow this place up, Tom run!’ Harry knows in his breaking bones that this is not a nightmare. He feels like he has been shot but there are no wounds, not on him. He feels like an intruder in this war-ridden tragic nightmare where his brain is like a broken record. It is unfair to those with reason to suffer. The worst has already happened to him, but he is terrified of what is inside of him. His organs are such ugly things, they twist and rupture and fail and above all his organs are not his anymore. He doesn’t know where he ends and where Tom begins.

Tom, with an accent of blood, who speaks in almost foreign a tongue whose vowels are the sound of metals clashing. His ebony hair is streaked with daggers, Harry notices as he runs down the old orphanage’s stairs and catches a glimpse of young Tom. He has iron filling his lungs and each breath invitingly toxic.

I don’t want to die, a mantra keeps being chanted at the back of his head. Harry has spent way too many nights dreaming of spilling his blood to the moonlight, shipping out of his bones and slithering into the soul of someone else. Suddenly all his wishes are coming true. He does not know his identity. All he knows he’s bronze and bite and venom and fistfight. He knows he is Tom Riddle, he knows he’s the dawn that rises bloody and wrecks ships in its wake. He knows he’s a thicket of violent thorn, oyster pearl gone rogue. All he knows that he wants to do is dance out of his skin into another song not quite about heroes. But he also knows that this war will kill him and he does not want to die.

“Up Freak, what are you doing? Do you want to die?”, there’s a strong hand that is shaking Harry. He does not know for reality has long since merged with fantastical pain. Maybe he exists to burn, maybe he exists to bleed, he does not know which. 

“What has gotten into you these days freak?” 

It’s Duddley now, Harry needs space, he needs to breathe. He is soaked in pain, sadness and sweat. The world around him suddenly feels knives and chipped teeth. His city is ignited and the entire wizarding world screams his name. His existence is all war and they love him for it. His existence is breaking him and they call him holy. Dumbledore made him a God, made him a withering Apollo and people will follow him everywhere where all he wants to do is break in peace and cry and heal from Sirius. Harry remembers Hermionie saying her parents mentioned that incisors will only heal if saltwater is held in the mouth. There’s a wound inside Harry and all he wants to do is bathe in oceans of sorrow in order to move forward. He wants to ache in solitude and let the cuts close. He wants to pull his body together and then let his soul do the same. So he runs. Runs from 4th Privet Drive. Runs from suffocation. Runs from loss.

London is littered with cafes, he chose the one closest to the tracks. An ever motive force to remind him of moving on and proof that he can go back home, go back to Hogwarts.  
It is peaceful here. Slow jazz keeps humming itself in the background. There’s a girl working, she looks so peaceful that Harry is almost envious. Harry tries to figure her out a bit as she tucks her coffee brown hair behind her ears unconsciously. Sonder. That’s the word Harry has been craving a bit of. The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as his own.

“You are looking rather pale”

Harry snaps his eyes up to the beautiful girl, quite startled as he did not hear her approach.

“What’s the matter?”, she enquiries, ‘I don’t have enough rain to make up my own storm’ Harry wants to say but nothing comes out. He suddenly wants to be invincible, his knuckles turn white on the table edge he’d been holding on to. He tries to speak again looking at her hopeful face but nothing seems to come out. Like an itch too deep to reach, confusion of the hands, Harry can never seem to get comfortable.

“Nothing”, he gulps, “nothing.” 

A jumble of ‘May I get a cup of coffee please’ follows right after and Harry is unsure if he’s been understood. She smiles “One coffee coming right up.”

Harry returns it sincerely. He feels real blue, but almost it is the comfortable sort. He wants to cry for this glimpse of affection from a stranger. ‘Please take the ghosts from my heart’; Harry wants to anchor onto her, ‘I don’t want to be haunted anymore.’

He sags down in his chair, and stares out of the window and takes double as he sees Dumbledore standing. He’s stunned to realize how he sparks no joy anymore or maybe it is his own incredible detachment from everyone and everything around him. He gets the urge to cry again as he suddenly mourns the sad stories that he hasn’t heard yet. He imagines what it would be to drop dead right now, tight in this quaint cafe before Dumbledore can even save him, again. Will it feel like a good magic trick? Harry assumes it would feel like a dying home. He sees himself in shadows of things that don’t exist but he is certain, he’s pretty darn certain that the shadows see him too.

Despite the fact that he had spent every waking moment of the past few days to be really found, even at least by Dumbledore, he feels distinctly awkward as Harry faces him. Dumbledore, however, seemed completely relaxed.

“Keep your wand at the ready, Harry,” he says brightly. 

“But I thought I’m not allowed to use magic outside school, sir?”

“If there’s an attack,” says Dumbledore, “I give you permission to use any counter jinx or hex that might occur to you. However, I do not think you need to worry about being attacked tonight.”

“Why not, sir?”

“You are with me,” muses Dumbledore simply. “This will do, Harry.”

“You have not, of course, passed your apparition test,” he says again coming to an abrupt halt in front of a dark alleyway lit dimly by some far off light.

“No,” says Harry. “I thought you had to be seventeen?”

“You do,” replies Dumbledore. “So you will need to hold on to my arm very tightly. My left, if you don’t mind- as you can see, my wand arm is a little fragile at the moment.”

Harry grips Dumbledore’s proffered forearm.

“Very good,” smiles Dumbledore. “Well, here we go.”

Harry feels Dumbledore’s arm twist away from him and he redoubles his grip; the next thing he knows everything goes black; he is being pressed very hard from all directions; he cannot breathe, it feels like he is relieving his anxiety attack and he wants to stop existing. There are iron bands tightening around his chest; his eyeballs are being forced back into his head; his eardrums were being pushed deeper into his skull and then - 

He gulped great lungfuls of cold night air and opened his streaming eyes. It was a few seconds before he realized that the train station had vanished. He and Dumbledore were standing in what appeared to be a deserted village square, in the centre of which stood an old war memorial and a few benches.

He could see the first signs of a shower by now. The sky looked like the night washed in bleach slipping off light and mitigated colours. This place reeked of suppressed memories, like Harry was desperately searching for the sun but it was nowhere to be seen. It was hidden behind the thick layers of gas that were not sufficiently translucent to allow the rays of the star to reach the ground.  
His comprehension with his senses, Harry realised that he had just apparated for the first time.

“Are you alright?” asked Dumbledore looking down at him solicitously. “The sensation does take some time getting used to.”

“I’m fine,” replied Harry. “But I think I might prefer brooms…”

Dumbledore smiled, drew his travelling cloak a little more tightly around his neck, and said, “This way.”

What had halted Harry were the tiny aftershocks of recognition of the street. The shadow that is missing now had once appeared to follow him on his way to this very familiar destination unknown.

They set off at a brisk pace, past an empty inn and a few houses. The nearby church reminded Harry that it was midnight.

“So tell me, Harry,” said Dumbledore. “Your scar has it been hurting at all?”

Harry raised a hand unconsciously to his forehead and rubbed the lightning-shaped mark. It hits him like a jolt, the unwillingness to answer that question. Not a gentle whisper but a screaming; not a flowing cadence of images but a deluge. The pain, he feels like a trickle - a stream - a river. He tastes it in his mouth. Feels it on his skin, sticky and warm as he answers with a ‘No’.

‘No’, he says, “and I’ve been wondering about that. I thought it would be burning all the time now that Voldemort’s getting so powerful again.”

He glances up tentatively, hoping to pencil down Dumbledore’s expression and realises that it’s satisfaction. 

“I, on the other hand, thought otherwise,” says Dumbledore. “Lord Voldemort has finally realized the dangerous access to his thoughts and feelings you have been enjoying.”

Harry shakes at his words. There’s wild panic still, racing through his veins, and he realizes that these feelings might not be just his. It is a ghost panic. 

“It appears that he is using Occlumency against you.” Dumbledore continues as they turn a corner, passing a telephone box and a bus shelter. Harry looks sideways at Dumbledore again. “Professor?”

“Harry?”

“Er- where exactly are we?”  
“This, Harry, is the charming village of Budleigh Babberton.”

Somehow, even before Dumbledore answered Harry seemed to have known that. How he did, that he knows not.

“And what are we doing here?”

“Ah yes, of course, I haven’t told you.” quirks the old Professor. “Well, I have lost count of the number of times I have said this in recent years, but we are, once again, one member of staff short. We are here to persuade an old colleague of mine to come out of retirement and return to Hogwarts.”

“How can I help with that, sir?”

“Oh, I think we’ll find a use for you,” says Dumbledore vaguely. “Left here, Harry.”

They proceeded up a steep, narrow street lined with houses. All the windows were dark. The old chill that had lain over Privet Drive for two weeks persisted here too, and Harry has survived the feeble beginning of the fall.

“Professor, why couldn’t we just apparate directly into your old colleague’s house?”

“Because it would be quite as rude as kicking down the front door,” said Dumbledore. “Courtesy dictates we offer fellow wizards the opportunity to deny an entry. In any case, most wizarding dwellings are magically protected from unwanted aparators. At Hogwarts, for instance -”

“-You cannot apparate anywhere inside the building or grounds,” Harry spoke up, “Hermionie told me.”

“And she is quite right. We turn left again.”

But it felt that a part of Harry’s soul knew that already.

“Sir, I saw in the Daily Prophet that Fudge has been sacked…”

“Correct, as I am sure you also saw, he has been replaced by Rufus Scrimgeour, who- ouch!”

He had pointed at his injured hand.

“Professor, what happened to your…?”

“A failed attempt to take something which was not mine. I have no time to explain now.” winced the old man, “it’s a thrilling tale, I wish to it justice,” smiled Dumbledore.  
They were now nearing a small, neat storehouse set in it’s own garden. The old house they were standing in front of looked like it might have grown right out of the ground a hundred years ago, deep-set in the grass and sagging in the middle. The paint on the shutters peeling.

“Oh, dear. Oh dear, dear, dear.”

Harry followed his gaze up the carefully tended front path.

“Wand out and follow me Harry” and Harry wants to rebel to go ahead for he knows what he will see. ‘Lumos’ Dumbledore’s wand tip ignited, casting its light up a narrow hallway. 

“To the left,” another door stood open. Holding his illuminated wand aloft, Dumbledore walks into the sitting room with Harry right behind him.

The devastation that stares back crawls his skin for it seems like he has walked right amidst his thoughts. The splintered grandfather clock, face cracked, and pendulum-like an abandoned sword; a piano with it’s keys strewn across the floor; the broken chandelier all scream his name for treason. He can hear betrayal echo his name from the defeated cushions to the powdered china.

“Not pretty, is it?” Dumbledore says heavily eyeing the darkly red and glutinous splatter over the wallpaper. Harry wants to scream, ‘Yes! Like you left me, Professor, all alone in the haze of tragedy’ but can not breathe out a single word for the magic in the house whispers his name as they call him the cause.

“I don’t think they dragged him out, he’s still here, yes.” Dumbledore states as his wand reveal the man who seems just too familiar - like a name at the tip of the tongue - Harry can vow to have never seen this man ever and yet he feels he has once called him “Professor”. He can feel the anxiety before a panic attack at this too familiar an unfamiliarity.

“Would you like my assistance clearing up?” Dumbledore speaks to the crouched tall, thin, bald, old man, who was massaging his lower belly and squinting up at Dumbledore with an aggrieved and watery eye.

“Please”, says he as both his and Dumbledore’s wands move in identical motion to bring some meaning behind the chaos. The furniture flows back to its original places; ornaments reform in midair, feather zooms into their cushions; torn books repair; oil lanterns land onto side tables and reignite. It was when he rises to clear the blood from the wall that the new man’s eyes fall on Harry.

“Oho,” says he, his large round eyes fly into Harry’s forehead and the lightning-shaped sear. 

“This,” says Dumbledore, moving forward to make the introduction, “is Harry Potter. Harry, this is an old friend and colleague of mine, Horace Slughorn; but a part of Harry’s soul, it appears, happens to have known him already.  
Slughorn turns on Dumbledore, his expression shrewd. “So this is how you thought you’d persuade me, is it?”

“No,” says Dumbledore serenely, shaking back his sleeve to reveal the tips of those burned and blackened fingers; the sight of them makes Harry’s neck prickle unpleasantly.

“I am undoubtedly slower now, but on the other hand…” he shrugs and spreads his hand wide to show a ring. It is large, rather clumsily made of what looked like gold and set with a heavy black stone that shines. Harry immediately finds the sensation of a lost ring which he used to twirl but never in his life had he had the privileges of daily food yet let alone jewelry, but he knows, he knows the one that Dumbledore wears is rightfully his and his hands itch for retrieving it back.

“But, Albus, it can’t be-” Harry now notices that the other professor has gone ghostly pale. He seems to have stopped breathing. Dumbledore assures it is a replica, but the dread still lingers heavily on his eyes. Dumbledore excuses himself to the washroom.

“You look very like your father.”

“Yeah, I have been told,” replies Harry.

“Except for your eyes. You’ve got-” 

“My mother’s eyes, yeah.” Harry had heard it so often he finds it a bit wearing.

“Hmpf. Yes, well. You shouldn’t have favorites as a teacher, of course, but she was one of mine, your mother. She should have been in my house, Slytherin, I used to tell her. I suppose you’re Gryffindor too? Goes in families. Except for that one Sirius Black! You must have heard of him- he was in the papers, died a few weeks ago_”

The bile returns and Harry starts to fidget and his head spins. He wonders if Dumbledore likes to save him to hurt some more for it feels like so.

“Your mother was a Muggleborn, of course. Could not believe it when I found out. Though she must have been a pure-blood, she was so good.”

“One of my best friends is a Muggleborn,” replies Harry, “and she’s the best in our year.”

“ Funny how that sometimes happens, isn’t it?”

“Not really,” Harry lets some venom in his voice.

He pays Harry little heed as he prompts away the name of his collected students.

“Hogwarts has always been a safe place for me to collect my gems. I have been so out of touch with everybody due to You-Know-Who,” sighs the old man.

Harry tunes him out to wait for Dumbledore. He re-enters after minutes. In going by his face and Slughorn’s far-off gaze Harry realizes that Dumbledore has truly succeeded in recruiting him back. Then they are setting off down the garden path. 

“I’ll want a pay raise Dumbledore! Goodnight Harry!” Slughorn's voice floats as Dumbledore chuckles.

“Goodnight Professor,” Harry is certain, it is someone else who speaks for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much love. Love us back by leaving kudos.  
> Eagerly waiting to read your remarks and comments.


	3. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning - graphic depiction and description of self harm (mentioned above the paragraph)  
> Dialogues in italics are in Parseltongue.

A familiar and welcoming sight of old Wellington boots and rusty cauldron welcomes Harry to the Burrow. Dumbledore’s knock resonates over the soft chuckling of the sleepy chickens coming from a distant shed.

“Who’s there?” says a nervous voice Harry recognizes as Mrs. Weasley’s. “Declare yourself!”

“It is I, Dumbledore, bringing Harry.”

The door opens at once to reveal Mrs. Weasley, short, plump, and wearing an old green dressing gown, along with Nymphadora, a young witch with a pale heart-shaped face and mousey brown hair.

She looks drawn, tired as she gets up to retire herself from the Burrow along with Dumbledore.

“Well, I shall see you at Hogwarts, Harry,” says Dumbledore. “Take care of yourself Molly, your servant.” He then promptly vanishes along with Tonks.

“You’re like Ron,” sighs Mrs. Weasley, looking him up and down. “Both of you look as though you’ve had stretching jinxes put on you. I swear Ron’s grown four inches since I last bought him his school robes. Are you hungry, Harry?

Famished, he replies, suddenly feeling the sense of hunger wreck him.

“Sit down, dear, I’ll knock something up.”

Harry turns around and comes face to face with Ginny. Beautiful beautiful Ginny, but all he can see her now is through a stale tinted pair of glasses. Harry tries to look for love in his closet of souls and realises Ginny does not make him feel like the first rain kissing the dirt, his body does not mend it’s aches, does not wild his blood. There is no rhyme scheme, he feels like his soul is a poem he keeps setting aside. He feels like he is in a garden of roses covered in frost.

‘Harry’ calls out Ginny. Ginny has surveyed the roses and has called them beautiful.

‘Ginny.’ Harry greets. Harry knows, although that the roses are choking, the petals will fall off soon. Harry, yet again, can not breathe. There is no beauty in cold. He wants to scream to Ginny, to Dumbledore to the entire wizarding world who deems him to be salvation. He wants to scream to put an end to the wretched chorus of the ‘Boy who lived’ spilling from their rotten mouth. But all he can do is stand still and watch as everything dies and think about the roses and how he is also choking.

He has hollow bones of birds that likes to echo. Old, broken. He has not found ways to heal. Lately it has been only echoing and it rings the loudest as he sees Mr. Weasley come downstairs and give Mrs. Weasley’s cheeks a warm kiss. Harry finds himself standing in the middle of the kitchen. A furry ginger cat with a squashed face bumps onto his knees and settles there purring.

“So Hermione’s here?” he asks as he tickles Crookshanks behind his ears.

“Oh yes, she arrived the day before yesterday.” says Ginny. “Everyone is in bed of course. We didn’t expect you for hours.”

“Here you are…” Mrs. Weasley taps a large iron pot with her wand as Mr. Weasley enquires about his more muggle related enquiries. But Harry’s thoughts echoes and breaks into hopes and staunch beliefs that love may exist but not for him. He echoes with loneliness aching deep in his bones. He sits in a corner of his thoughts and blindly grasps for what he knows is not there and yet cannot help looking for. He echoes with heartbreak, with pain, but nothing is new anymore and death would be a welcomed change. Who could ever deem to even love him, he ponders, he has always felt the heaviness of the dying soul attached to him. He has always been the battlefield where the bodies fall.

“So you persuaded Horace Slughorn to take the job?” speaks Mrs. Weasley breaking Harry’s brooding trance.

Harry nods solemn, as he watches Ginny leave.

“He taught me and Aurther.” says her, “he was at Hogwarts for ages, started around the same time as Dumbledore, He even taught You Know Who!”

Harry freezes with realization as it dawns upon him the cause of the familiarity of the unfamiliar.

Harry shrugs and gives a noncommittal jerk of the head, too terrified to even speak.

“What is your dearest ambition?” speaks up Mr. Weasley, “Mine is to find out how airplanes stay up.” Harry just wants it all to stop. For he feels like he is standing right in the middle of nowhere and holding the compass which shows no direction with dear life. Suddenly all the world’s lassitude seems to gnaw up on him and he cannot stop himself from stifling a yawn behind his hand.

“Bed,” says an undeceived Mrs. Weasley at once. “I’ve got Fred and Geoge’s room ready for you, you’ll have it to yourself.”

“Why, where are they?”

“Oh, they are in Diagon Alley, sleeping in the little flat over their joke shop as they’re so busy,” says her.  
“I must say I didn’t approve at first, but they do seem to have a bit of a flair for business! Come on dear, your trunk is already up there.

“Night, Mr.Weasley,” says Harry pushing back his chair. Crookshanks leaps lightly from his lap and shrinks out of the room.

“G’night Harry,” replies Mr. Weasley warmly.

(Trigger warning - depiction and description of self-harm)

Fred and George’s bedroom is on the second floor. Mrs. Weasley points her wand at a lamp on the bedside table and it ignited at once, bathing the room in a pleasant golden glow. Harry then bids her a goodnight. Though a large vase of flowers has been placed on a desk in front of the small window, their perfume cannot disguise the lingering smell of what Harry thinks is gunpowder.

Harry smiles to himself at the wicked games of ironies and metaphors life has been painting out for him. A considerable amount of floor space is devoted to the vast number of unmarked, sealed cardboard boxes, amongst which stands Harry’s school trunk.

The room looks as though it has been used as a temporary warehouse and funnily enough that is what exactly Harry has been raised to feel. His mouth suddenly tastes foul, of bitter milk, and jaw aches due to the tension stretching at his muscles. He wants to stick himself into the fog and make a ghost of himself, he is tired of being glorified into a tragedy. He wants to run downstairs and look for Mrs. Weasley’s knives and bleed out this sadness inside. He holds up his wrists tattered with marks and moonlight makes it look like hollow bones against his dark skin.

He hurriedly shuffles through his trunk in search of those razor blades, the ones he bought from the corner store just in case he needed to bleed out some feelings back at Hogwarts. He takes them out, they are new and they sparkle in the moonlight. Maybe he can never remove the hurt from his insides but the marks remind him that he is still, unfortunately, alive and Sirius, is not. People don’t think, they don’t get it unless one’s covered in blood, they think that they are okay. Unless the story is raw enough, they dismiss their pain.

Harry too maybe thinks like that so he presses the blade onto his skin. Time does not heal all wounds, one just gains experience in dealing with the pain. So, Harry lets himself bleed. He was a sidewalk suddenly hailed as a marble sculpture and then inflicted with blows. He is cracked now, unpretty and he does not know which days are worse. He unceremoniously falls down on the bed and looks at his bleeding wrist. He thinks he might be an excellent procrastinator, putting off dying until the last possible second. As he wipes out the blood from his mouth after another coughing fit. Harry realizes that he may not have much time left and closes his eyes.

(End of trigger warning)

Seconds later, or so Harry thinks, he is awakened by what sounded like cannon fire. Instinctively he looks out the window to see a part of the barn being set on fire. The commotion outside forces him to run down only to find Mrs. Weasley holding onto Mr. Weasley’s shirt looking as pale as death. Lupin, Harry notices is also standing side by side to Nymphadora. Harry pushes them to come face to face with what could be only described as the beginning of destruction. Suddenly he is angry. He wants to scream to yell but his mouth has kept itself all tightly shut. A wildfire is burning his senses to ashes but a tight-pressed line keeps it inside.

“I killed Sirius Black,” a sudden shrill pierces the grave-tinted silence and Harry knows now that he wants to set Bellatrix on fire even if he himself cannot conquer the sun. So he follows her. He runs. He escapes Lupin trying to catch up with him. He turns a blind ear to Mrs.Weasley’s pleadings. Rebellion should look good upon him. It always does, on anyone. Harry sees her, running amok in the reedy, muddy ditch, announcing periodically in case it was not clear the first twenty times- that she killed Sirius Black. The world appears to be burning around in mad mourning, in death.

“Are you going to get me Potter?” Bellatrix sings, and then there’s deafening silence. The reeds seem to whisper amongst themselves, mourning and chanting the name of Ares, of war.

“Stupefy!” Harry deflected a spell and realised that it was one of Greybacks. Ginny screams his name making him run in her direction. His feet are burning, his hands ache and feels safer to fall dead but vengeance keeps him alive and breathing. He reaches a clearing and turns the corner and he stops breathing. He feels like drowning like water is closing off on top of him., like he has swallowed lead. You never realize the luxury of breathing until you can’t anymore. Harry’s skin is alight with righteous fury as he stares into the eyes of Lord Voldemort standing next to an old tree. Apt realises Harry. Yew is the tree of sorrow, he remembers Hermione telling him so. His stares seem to devour Harry. Harry stares back as he sees curiosity and not hatred staring at him. It smells of sweet decay and Harry knows his feelings can break bones and a touch would shoot pretty pain throughout his body.

But he will love it. He will call it salvation. Years of treading water and his head still barely above the surface for when Harry believes his learned to swim, Harry sees him and his limbs turn to concrete.

He looks into his eyes and sees the frenzy of soundless screams, of blazing bodies of wine mingling with blood painting everything in the shades of red.

Harry watches as he deflects a stray hex and realizes love is a spoonful of hemlock that he had been dying to try. Prostration catches onto him as he stands staring at a curious Dark Lord. He is a plethora of blood-warm shadows.

“Harry Potter”

Harry is a broken lover, he has a system of failing organs and collapsing supernovas, of purple galaxies that maybe are bruises. It took him an eternity to realize he is dying to love and loving to die for a tragedy.

His eyes hold storms and sunsets and when Harry looks into them the flowers blooming in his lungs grow taller. He is speechless because he’s too full of the things he wants to speak out. Voldemort’s stares put Harry to rest and wades out a war, fades out a world. Harry, unfortunately, knows that nothing will ever end poetically. Everything ends and one turns it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful, it was just red.

_“ **Harry Potter, what are you?** ”_

_“ **I**_ **_don’t know_ _”_ **

Memories maybe are like families - one can always walk away, one can always disappear. Harry feels like a hopeful anarchist. His throat tightens, light drains from his eyes but he knows that his cheeks are ablaze. Harry feels in colours of violet and purples, but as he looks up to the cognac eyes- it is a fever of fury- of striped carnation flowers kept long after they are dead. It looks like the stain of blood on Harry’s wrist long after he falls asleep to sadness slipping slowly off his body. The eyes take the colour of dried blood at the corner of Harry’s lips as he wipes away hints of death, but Harry holds those coughed up flowers to his chest like it is salvation instead of damnation. He always welcomes monsters into his bed and sets a place for them at breakfast- leaves sugar out for their coffee. Harry has always been so good at loving monsters.

Voldemort holds up his left hand and Harry chokes on his secrets and wants to hide away all his scars. He runs his thumbs over his palm but it feels to Harry like bomb debris fills up his lungs, a little too close for comfort. But the ache in his soul is half empty now.

"Who? "

Harry feels closest to all angels as he stands in the middle of the thunderstorm. What must he tell him? There's a rotten flower in his mouth and he has some left over decaying heartbeats. What must he tell him? Every night he wants to move out of his body for he doesn't feel worthy of any air filling up his lungs. What must he tell him? He is a slow dance of bullets, an autopsy trying to make conversations with the people around him. He has a ballad for a bruised lung he calls life where he is counting on flower petals-- do I kill myself or will I wait for love-- he chants as a mantra every day before sleep takes him.

Harry has no answer. So he stares at him. At his deepest fears. He sees blood-red bleed into the cognac eyes. The cognac eyes, his boggart had changed a long past from dementors to this blood tainted eyes of the battlefield he calls home. Harry is familiar with this look of insanity. He has seen this insanity when an emancipated, skeletal form first rose from the cauldron and laid his eyes on Harry. He sees anger, hatred and rage in the man’s eyes. He looks like a disbelieving victor scared and bleeding. His eyes promise pain and torture but not at Harry it was for whoever had dared to hurt him. Harry’s eyes widen with surprise, wearing the fears of a child jumping at shadows, flinching at raised voices. No one had ever been this angry at Harry’s pain, so angry that he looks like an un-swung axe.

"Harry? Harry, where are you? "

Professor Lupin is looking for him and Harry's heart stops at the possible image of Voldemort's discovery and the next flurry of moments he feels like death. He feels like he has touched the switch back at Privet Drive with wet hands because no love warned him against electricity. Then Voldemort is there no more. Harry has a heart with a hole that could have fit them both so he knows, he knows, he would have hid Tom if he stayed a second longer.

"Harry, boy, are you alright? " Lupin heaves. He has been running.

"Yes, Professor."

"I- Harry, I thought I lost you too". 'Like I lost Sirius' remains unsaid. Harry realizes that the grief wasn't just his alone. There's a chemical imbalance in his head which likes to remind him that someone he loves has died before him and will die before he does and it will be his fault. He wants to scream for forgiveness to be born. He wants to scream and tell people that he should not be hailed for he was never the Messiah. He is the one who had been leading people to death.

" Come on, let's get you warm", Lupin tugs at his arms and Harry realizes he's seeping wet and suddenly this wetness is reaching his bones and crushing it. He looks at the sky and finds no comfort. It's cloudy. He has no constellation to draw Sirius's name upon. Today, the sky to mourns his death. Harry knows now why constellations are named after either heroes or grief. Sirius was both of it.

***

"Oh Harry, my boy, I was so worried." Weeps Mrs. Weasley holding onto him. Distance is all Harry feels of a sudden. Far too strung to be amidst so many people.

"Harry! Harry, god you scared the hell out of me", Hermione comes and hugs him. And Harry let's go. Hermione has always been very coarsely gentle with him. She has always left him words about how split milk and dying stars are the same in the infinite world and insignificance has always been a solace to Harry. But Harry is born to die like a dying star - with just too many collateral damage.

" I'm fine. I'm alright ". He soothes her, he soothes Mrs. Weasley, soothes everyone in the room. He soothes himself, for he's of the lot to carry cataclysm in their blood vessels. He feels like he has written his tragedies in the inside of his palms, so when he extends his hands it smears on the bodies of other people.

"You rushed out Harry, and the Ginny too and it scared us so much, YOU BOTH COULD HAVE DIED, DO YOU HEAR THAT? "

Harry feels apologetic. He absolutely forgot about Ginny. Harry looks for Ginny amongst the crowd and sees her. She looks her normal self, beautiful, looking now like a docile lamb in her white lace dress. She was the one he was expected to fall in love, but She could never have the thin pale lips that may taste like lying. Nor can she take off the top of her ribs to fit Harry's soul for he seems to carry some extra.

Harry remembers how Hermione once mentioned how it takes two weeks to a month to remove the entirety of his skin, the bottom layer of the epidermis to wear off, because every time one touches anything, they leave a part of them behind. He looks at his left hand where the touch still burns of curiosity, of suspicion, of somehow a hint of security. So he suddenly wants to put his hand on everything to wear off the false sense of security as it blooms deep inside his lungs.

He looks around to see Lupin sitting near the fireplace, looking pale, Harry doesn't near him in his grief. He sees Ron holding Ginny with Mr. Weasley hovering over them. Hermione is still scrutinizing him and he doesn't waste a second as he feels like a bout of cough coming up.

"I'm tired", he mumbles.

" Certainly dear boy, get to bed and don't come out. No matter what. You hear me? "

"Yes, Mrs. Weasley".

" Stay put. "

Harry has a heart too heavy now, and lungs too full that it thinks it probably might be malfunctioning. He feels one step away from crying for he has let himself sink into emotions too thick to breathe in. He wants to trade his body but his brain won't let it repair it from all these hurts for that is all he knows. He was born out of war, it won't be poetic enough if he doesn't die with his body at war with itself.

Hermione looks at him and Harry smiles weakly but then his smile cuts into two as he can see the scars he's yet to show her, the emptiness that puts their pale long fingers upon his neck and chokes him, he can feel the sharp blade he left by his bed upstairs. He has so many skeletons in his closet that they are slipping and now unfortunately maybe showing on his face.

He trudges up the stairs and finally slumps at his bed. He tries to chalk up words to fill Hermione with. How should he explain to her that half of the time he's not in control of his own body? How should he explain that sometimes he self-destructs and he likes to see his pain slip past him, like seeing a train wreck from a distance. How can he tell her that he can hear his bones break with every flower that blooms but he can't feel anything?

***

The boy had appeared to be a mystery. Ghost boys knew how to give up, he wasn't one of them. He wasn't one of them even when he had that kind of an untold truth staring dead into his mouth, with a heart so cold it could keep a life stagnant for years.

The room is drenched is unclaimed promises, in darkness, in hunger, in unmitigated power. It sounds like penance but he wants to be tender and merciful. Unduly valorous. But it doesn't matter at curiosity gnaws up his spine and chews at the tail of his dress shirt.

He looked like he had light inside him, the boy, like a house on fire. Like he would choose his own murder over anyone else. Naive? Unwise? A mere boy amidst war? He knew he could not hurt the boy even if he tried, they were both too alike. He wondered if the boy felt like he did when he stood amongst the debris of war, of death, back in his orphanage. Did he feel like a crumpled heartbeat?

Curiosity. It has to be inane curiosity of having found another parselmouth. The scars. The “I must not tell lies”. The boy looked so disoriented, hands trembling. The boy reeked of brazen poison and rotten flowers. One could see him decay, crumble. Was it the shadow of his past that made him this curious, mused the man in the dark room?

But the scars? Alphabets of longings? Or was it something more? The boy's skin of courage was peeling from his bones but the rot was there. The rot will always be there, just under the surface. His eyes were the colour of envy, what else could it be? Envy has always looked like dew on fresh leaves in the morning. Hubris has always been deadly and the boy with eyes looking of death wore it like a lazy clock mocking him with life with humbled hunger. It was green. It was the same green he mocked the boy's parents with till they were left aching. Dead. The dark forest could never make him ask who as the boy's eyes could. The dark forest could never whisper _Nolite timere._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you like the update!


	4. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: Mentions of suicide and self-harm at the beginning of the chapter

Harry looks out of the window to see a ghost of the garden that's growing inside of his ribs. Maybe Keats was right all along when he wanted to be a summer butterfly and live but three summer days. He traces the scar on his forehead and looks down at his old and worn notebook. 

Harry has years of thoughts not uttered stuffed in the back pocket of his worn-out pair of jeans and his only salvation is to pick up a pencil and lay all his emotions bare on paper. He has been drawing the same eyes over and over again. Cognac eyes.

Art has always been too gentle with him- like warm tea, like big Weasley jumpers, the sky when the sun sets, like a hand to hold. But art has inevitably led him to terrible places, it has dragged him to torment, to suffering but held Harry in too warm an embrace. Maybe he's too indulgent in his sufferings, for sadness is addictive. It is easy to get lost down the twisted path of self-destruction. 

Today he is a bit too indulgent, a bit too irrelevant. He wanted to be a fading Polaroid sometimes. Trying to erase the eyes from his memories. He knows very well how oblivion works. It's the eyes that first forget, then it's the ears, and then in weeks the body too forgets but Harry has a mind that remembers everything, it is filled with the bittersweet ache between wanting and having. 

So, Harry draws Tom. Harry draws the Dark Lord. 

He does not want to fight. He will learn to fight

Art has always been an extension of himself, a form of salvation. Stitches and scars. Harry has dreams of him heaving into a dilapidated bed and bugs come out from his insides. He tries to swallow them back into his empty flower corrupted body, coughing and choking the entire time. He wakes up in his dreams to stare at the mirror and a boy stares back with cognac eyes, the same eyes that he is never tired of scribbling. Again and again. 

He dreams that he is caught in the entrails of the dead bodies of his loved ones, of everyone who died for him. Their bloodstains him red and he screams and he tries to run and run and run and wakes up to realise he has blood all over him.

Harry sometimes bleeds through other people's wounds. But he has a tragedy-stricken heart, tear-stained cheeks, cherry-stained lips, and sugared teeth. He crafts metaphors out of pain and pours them into his art and tries to build something beautiful out of the rubble, at least that's what Tom told him in his second year. 

Is he not too young to be this sad? Is he not too young to know love that can kill him? 

Some days he can't sleep. His sheets are stained with sweat. Some days he wants to swallow death potions and step in front of fast cars. But he chases the realization with self-harm, blades in places where he should be held tighter. 

He has dried Carnation petals for breakfast, hot coffee for lunch, failed love for dinner. Art has no meaning until it is given one. The little paint strokes and shades and colors all come together to mean life in it’s all myriad colours. Life has no meaning until it is given one. 

Harry stares down at the eyes he is so fond and terrified of drawing. Wonders why the eyes grew so cold and what constellations did one and rewrote the story. He wonders even if Tom Riddle can save himself, does he long to be rescued sometimes? 

Harry has always hidden his art. From the world. From his friends. From himself. He was too terrified to draw more than the eyes lest he gets too consumed to wake up. The storm is dumb and thoughtless but it swallows him whole and blooms more flowers in its wake. He wishes it was more poetic than this, than death. 

Sometimes Harry believes he has fallen too deep, too deep that he has become the saltwater that chokes him. He's drowning but the burn down his windpipe seems very welcoming. The storm has finally become a part of him although it has killed him over a thousand times. His words get stuck in his throat and his strength hurts him back deep inside his soul. 

He remembers back when he showed his art to Tom when he sought it. Twelve-year-old Harry had found acceptance that rung through his bones, that would quiet the voice inside his head that used to call him a failure and sounded very much like Aunt Petunia. He was too young to not grow fond of Tom Riddle who showed him hope, who asked him to grow. 

_That's lovely art, Harry ___  
It isn't that good  
_Well, you are doing your best then._

___Little Harry would find his breath taken away as he would look up to Tom Riddle. He would seek words that would ring through his bones and heal all the sounds that Privet Drive traced him with. He would look at Tom and have his stomach surge with feelings of veneration he has for him. Little Harry would be found, would be heard, would be appreciated. The diary would give comfort to him as if it shared a part of his soul that always felt a little bit alien._ _ _

___Harry looks down at those eyes one last time before packing up his art to hide away inside of him. In some times Ron would wake up and he could pretend to be asleep. Hedwig hooted happily at Harry from her perch on top of a large wardrobe, then took off through a window. Harry knew she had been waiting to see him before going hunting._ _ _

___He laid down and put the covers over his head, and drew him a facade. Minutes later, the door burst open and he sat upright to hear the rasp of the curtains being pulled back: the dazzling seemed to poke him hard in both eyes. Ron, has always been a little less considerate, but Harry has always pushed that thought back in the corner of his mind._ _ _

___"Wuzzgoinon?"_ _ _

___"Mum's calling you for breakfast! ", says a loud and excited voice, and Harry receives a sharp blow on the top of his head._ _ _

___" Ron, don't hit him", says a girl's voice reproachfully._ _ _

___Harry shoves his glasses up his nose. A long, looking shadow quivered in front of him for a moment; he blinked and Ron Weasley came into focus. He was scrunching down at him._ _ _

___"All right? "_ _ _

___"Never been better" smarts, Harry._ _ _

___He rubs his head asking, "and you? "_ _ _

___"Not bad. Were the muggles alright? Did they treat you okay?"_ _ _

___"Same, the usual", chokes up Harry._ _ _

___Hermione perches herself on the side of his bed and looks at him too scrutinizingly for his comfort. He fears that his scars will show, both of his hands and the ones marking up his lungs with every breath he takes, with every pair of eyes he draws. She was looking at him as he was sick, which he was, but he did not intend to discuss Sirius's death or last night._ _ _

___" What time is it? "_ _ _

___"Late enough. Mum is bringing you up a tray, she recons you look a bit underfed." Says Ron, rolling his eyes. "So, what's going on? "_ _ _

___"Nothing much, I have been stuck at my Aunt and Uncle's, haven't I? " Harry impresses, as his heart plunges. He is afraid to be discovered. His flowers and scars are both too personal a secret to part with._ _ _

___"Come off it," insists Ron, quite strangely and not with any form of comfortable curiosity, "you have been off with Dumbledore"._ _ _

___"It was not that exciting. He just wanted me to help him persuade this old teacher to come out of retirement. His name is Horace Slughorn"._ _ _

___"Oh, " Says Ron, looking disappointed. "We thought-"_ _ _

___Hermione flashes Ron a warning look at Ron and Ron changes tack at top speed._ _ _

___"... We thought it would be something like that. "_ _ _

___"You did? ", asks Harry, a little apprehensive, a little amused._ _ _

___" Yeah… yeah, now Umbridge has left, obviously we need a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, don't we? So, what's he like? "_ _ _

___"He looks like a bit of a walrus, and he used to be the Head of the Slytherin." Harry is distracted by Hermione's wary look and is instantly on alert. "Something wrong, Hermione? " Asks Harry a little anxiously._ _ _

___She seems to have been watching him as though expecting any strange a symptom to manifest themselves upon any moment. She rearranges her features in a hasty smile which ends up looking extremely unconvincing._ _ _

___"No, of course not. So, um, did Slughorn seem like a good teacher? "_ _ _

___Harry pulls down his sweater paws. He can't be more secure. The pain he has is way too intimate, way too much to let lose to the world. His stomach has taken to fluttering anxiously as he finds himself under the scrutinizing glance of Hermione Granger._ _ _

___"Dunno, he can't be worse than Umbridge, now can he be? Can anyone be? "_ _ _

___"Well, certainly not. Tonks was here by the way, but had to leave before you woke up. Auror duties", Hermione informs._ _ _

___" I miss the old Tonks. She has been looking more of a Moaning Mrytle these days", supplies Ron._ _ _

___"That's not fair", snapped Hermione, "she still hasn't gotten over what has happened. .. You know, I mean… he was her cousin! "_ _ _

___Harry's heart sinks. They have arrived at Sirius. His head pound from holding back a flood of tears. His jaw tightens and he chokes up._ _ _

___People were not poetry but they had enough poetry in them to ruin you. Harry wants to run away. To escape. For good. Maybe there will far more stars that can be seen from the dark side of the moon. Everyone here seems to have read every droplet of his endless sea and yet, yet no one knows Harry. He is but the boy who lived. He never got to be Harry. He never got to balm his pain. He himself for it. He hates everyone around him for it but still they continue to live his life for him._ _ _

___"Tonks and Sirius barely knew each other", says Ron. "Sirius was in Azkaban half her life, and before that their families never met… "_ _ _

___"That's not the point", Hermione counters, " She thinks it was her fault he died! "_ _ _

___"How does she work that out? " Spits out Harry, in spite of himself. His head is spinning. Of guilt. Or anger. Of resentment from his fault being taken away from him. It is his fault that Sirius is dead. No one can take that away, no one can take away reasons by which he grounds himself._ _ _

___ _

___"Well, she was fighting Bellatrix, wasn't she? I think she feels that if only she could have her finished off, look, Bellatrix could not have killed Sirius"._ _ _

___"That's stupid", says Ron._ _ _

___" It's the survivor's guilt." Says Hermione. " I know Lupin has tried to talk her round, but she is really really low. She's actually having troubles with her Metamorphosing"._ _ _

___"With her...? "_ _ _

___"She can't change her appearance like she used to", Hermione explains. "I think her powers have been affected by her shock or something"._ _ _

___" Well, it clearly wasn't her fault. If Sirius was not all up and about going ahead and killing The Dark Lord, he would not have gotten himself killed", says Ron in indignation and immediately falls silent._ _ _

___The stillness of the room is stifling. No one moves. No one dares. The sudden ache that consumes Harry feels too complicated to be crammed up in a metaphor. Sorrow seems to swallow Harry for breakfast this morning. Sorrow breaks open his bones and drag resentment out of his rib cage. Harry holds his wand a little stronger. A little whisper of a crucio is on his lips._ _ _

___Harry knows it is not his thought, but he entertains it. His soul feels sorrow in a spectrum of colours. A little smoked out, a little mitigated, and a lot more aggravated. A macabre awaits him, but he resists._ _ _

___Harry snaps out of his violent thoughts of crucio-ing his best friend and is stricken with hatred at himself. But did he not deserve it? Ron did. Ron deserved pain._ _ _

___Harry does not recognize himself. He feels scattered near and far. Hatred and malice bloom scarlet in him and he wants to cry out in shame. But it's so beautiful. He wants to swallow smoke just to feel some warmth from within._ _ _

___"I didn't know that could happen, the changing thing I mean,'' says Harry. The entire room seems to release a gust breath it seemed to be holding. Ron looks a bit guilty._ _ _

___" Nor did I. " speaks Hermione. "But I suppose if you're really depressed… "_ _ _

___The door opens to reveal a fretting Mrs. Weasley popping her head in. "Harry, come down for breakfast darling"._ _ _

___They all get up to get down._ _ _

___" Your mum said Fred and George's shop is going well and that they have got a real flair for business", speaks out Harry to distract himself as he was unable to bear the stifling silence and a screaming head._ _ _

___"That's an understatement,'' says Ron. " They are raking in the Galleons! I can't wait to see that place. We haven't been to the Diagon Alley yet, because mum says Dad's got to be there for extra security and he's been really busy with work, but it sounds excellent."_ _ _

___"And what about Percy? " Hermione questions about the third eldest of the Weasley brothers who had a fall out with the family in the controversy revolving Voldemort's return. "Is he talking to your mom and dad again? "_ _ _

___"Nope", confirms Ron._ _ _

___"Be he knows your dad was right all along now about Voldemort being back… "_ _ _

___"Dumbledore says people find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right, " Says Hermione, "I heard him telling your mum, Ron"._ _ _

___"Sounds like the sort of a mental thing Dumbledore would say, " Ron mutters._ _ _

___"He's going to give me private lessons this year, " Says Harry conversationally._ _ _

___Ron stumbles on the stairs as Hermione stands stock still._ _ _

___"You kept that quiet! " Accuses Ron._ _ _

___"I only just remembered, " Says Harry earnestly. "He told me last night before apparating. "_ _ _

___"Why did he not return to save you? " Continues Hermione, "Voldemort could have been there. Harry, you could have been killed"._ _ _

___Harry does not know how to confirm it to Hermione about the fact that Voldemort was, in fact, there. Harry knows in his deepest soul that Voldemort would not kill him off either. He was too curious to kill him. He could have if he wanted to, have him killed, but he protected Harry instead._ _ _

___He is afraid of the silence that had surrounded him last night after Voldemort's departure. The cold. The loneliness. It was as if his name has been plucked from still air only to be silenced forever. He stood there grasping at the echoes of magic that somehow has filled up the hollowness of his soul._ _ _

___But they don't know Harry. They have only seen his skin that too not too clear to see the scars that are littered over his arms like white threads. They have not heard his ribs creak as he lay dying out of love._ _ _

___"But, Blimey Harry, private lessons.. .with Dumbledore! " Ron tries to break down the tension and looks impressed alongside. "I wonder why he's… ?"_ _ _

___His voice trails away. Harry sees him and Hermione exchange looks as he drags a chair and sits down in the kitchen. His heart rather beats too fast considering he's just sitting down. "I don't know exactly why he's going to be giving me lessons, but I think it must be because of the prophecy"._ _ _

___Neither Ron nor Hermione speaks. Harry gets the impression that they both are frozen, so he continues picking up a fork, " You know the one they were trying to steal at the Ministry "._ _ _

___"Nobody knows what it said though, " Says Hermione quickly as she sweeps her eyes over the empty kitchen. "It got smashed"._ _ _

___"Although the prophet says… ", begins Ron only to be sushed down by Hermione._ _ _

___"The prophet has got it right, " informs them Harry looking up at both of them with a great effort. He feels too tired suddenly, like he is a violin without strings. It is as if Harry carries with him an ache he has convinced himself that he needs it. Hermione seems frightened and Ron looks amazed._ _ _

___"The glass ball that smashed wasn't the only record of the prophecy. I heard the whole thing in Dumbledore's office, he was the one the prophecy was made to. So he could tell me. From what it said, " Harry takes a deep breath, "it looks like I am the one who's got to finish off Voldemort… At least it said neither of us could live while the other survives"_ _ _

___Harry's mind feels like a stolen hurricane. He has a cage for a rib cage and the petals, he knows will slowly choke him of love. He would so much be in love that one day he would not be able to breathe. Harry wishes he can tell them this. Tell them no matter what, Harry is destined for death. Some people after all have tragedies in their blood._ _ _

___The three of them gazed at one another in silence for a moment._ _ _

___"Harry, Oh Harry… " Hermione whispers._ _ _

___"We wondered after we got back from the Ministry… obviously we didn't want to say anything to you, but from what Lucius Malfoy said about the prophecy, how it was about you and Voldemort, well, we thought it might be something like this… oh Harry", she said hastily but softly, "are you scared? "_ _ _

___Was Harry scared? If so, of what?. Then, no, no he was not scared of death._ _ _

___It was love, although, that he was more scared of. Love with his wicked smile and toxic fingertips. Love had a heartless laughter and a flash of ruby eyes. Love speaks with an accent of blood and has sweet poison laced in his tongue. Love has made Harry strip his lungs of their breaths. To grow pretty little flowers to look drenched in blood as it spines around his rib cage and kills him with every passing bloom. Was Harry scared of Love? Yes, yes, he was._ _ _

___"Not as much as I was,'' says Harry. " When I first heard it, I was… but not now. " Harry sighs into his lap and smiles to himself, a weak sad smile dripping with love. "But now it seems as though I always knew I'd have to face him in the end.''_ _ _

___"When we heard that Dumbledore would be collecting you in person, we thought that he might be telling you something or showing you something to do with the prophecy", says Ron eagerly, as if Harry's news if death is but a plot of drama to him. Harry does not want to over-analyze, but his skin has turned sensitive in some, impervious in others._ _ _

___"And we were kind of right, weren't we?"_ _ _

___"You mean, he would not want to train a lamb to the slaughter? ", Harry snaps._ _ _

___"Ron! Harry, he means to say Dumbledore believes you've still got a chance! " Hermione appeases. "I wonder what he will teach you, Harry! Really advanced defensive magic… powerful counter-curses… antijinxs?"_ _ _

___Harry did not listen. His head was muddled up. He feels like shards of glass are flowing through his bloodstream nipping at nook and corner leaving him tattered. Harry loses focus on the present._ _ _

___"... And evasive enchantments generally", concludes Hermione. "Well, at least you know one lesson you'll be having this year, that's one more than Ron and me. I wonder when our OWL results will come out."_ _ _

___"Can't be long now, it's been a month." Says Ron._ _ _

___ _

___***_ _ _

___ _

___It has only been days that Harry had received his OWL results. They were as good as he could hope for. He just felt a tiny twinge of regret… this was the end of his ambition of becoming an Auror as he was unable to score the appropriate grade in Potions to make an Auror out of himself._ _ _

___It was odd to have this said ambition and Harry smiled to himself in salty irony of having a disguised Death Eater implant into him the dream of becoming one. It had even seen right destiny for him since he heard the prophecy… Neither can live while the other survives… would he not be living up to the prophecy, and giving himself the best chance of survival, if he joined those highly trained wizards whose job was to find and kill Voldemort._ _ _

___Then what would he do? Would he be able to kill the person he is in love with? Or will love kill him even before he finally finds Voldemort?_ _ _

___It is an overcast and murky day. One of the special Ministry of Magic cars, in which Harry had ridden once before, has been waiting for them in the front yard when they emerged from the house, pulling on their robes._ _ _

___"Harry has been given top-grade security status. And we will be joining up with additional security at the Leaky Cauldron too. "_ _ _

___Harry says nothing; he does not fancy shopping while surrounded by a battalion of Aurors. The Leaky Cauldron looks, for the first time in Harry's memory, completely empty. Tom, the barkeeper looks to be gloomily wiping glasses._ _ _

___Diagon Alley seems changed. The colorful glittering window displays of spellbooks, potion ingredients, and cauldrons are lost behind huge Ministry of Magic posters that is posted over them. They brake up between two groups on their way to get shopping done quicker. Harry notices that most people who pass them have hurried, anxious expressions which are also very evident on the face of Mrs. Weasley. No one seems to stop to talk to anyone, the shoppers appeared to be together in their own tightly knit groups, moving intently about their business. Nobody seems to be shopping alone._ _ _

___As they reunited with most of their shopping done Harry hears Mrs. Weasley say, "We really haven't got too long" As they walk towards Weasley's Wizard wheezes. Set against the dull, poster muffled shop Fronts around them, Fred and George's window hits like a firework display._ _ _

___ _

___The right hand window of the shop was covered in posters mimicking those from the ministry, but emblazoned with flashing yellow letters:_ _ _

___WHY ARE WORRYING ABOUT YOU KNOW WHO? YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED ABOUT UNOPOO- THE CONSTIPATION SENSATION THAT'S GRIPPING THE NATION!!!_ _ _

___Harry starts to laugh but then he hears a weak sort of moan beside him and looks to see a horrified face of Mrs. Weasley mouthing the name 'UNoPoo'._ _ _

___"They'll be murdered in their beds", Hermione whispers horrified._ _ _

___"No they won't,” confirms Ron, who was like Harry, also laughing, "this is bloody brilliant. " And something in him told Harry that somehow this bad jibe at the name would be appreciated._ _ _

___And bloody brilliant it turns out to be, from Shielding Charms to edible dark marks to Instant Darkness Powder the shop seemed to be filled with all things bizarre and it was coming from a wizard himself._ _ _

___"Haven't you girls found our special WonderWitch products yet? ", says one Fred Wesley cladded in a magenta robe contrasting heavily with his flaming hair. "Follow me, ladies… "_ _ _

___An array of violently pink products seems to be stacked near the window where a cluster of excited girls appears to be giggling enthusiastically. Hermione and Ginny both hang back, looking wary._ _ _

___"There you go", says Fred proudly, "best range of love potions you'll find anywhere. "_ _ _

___"Do they work? " Asks Ginny skeptically raising her eyebrows._ _ _

___"certainly they work.. "_ _ _

___Harry misses out on the rest of the words as a deep sense of abhorrence seems to swallow him a cloud of muffled agony. His breath is stunted but he feels chaos brimming under his skin. He needs to run. He needs to run and find someplace alone, some solitude before he loses himself to feelings he doesn't recount owning._ _ _

___His memories feel like rain. Like Plath, Harry thinks he should go in search of the man whose soul he has been harboring. His flesh seems to be getting killed in presence of it. There's a collection of madness in his head he remembers not collecting. Suddenly he is staring at a crumpled picture, into the eyes of a woman who looks somehow, like the most defeated person he had ever seen. He feels an emotion too strange for him to describe. Hate. Love. Regret. Pity. He suddenly feels so fragile and it is not his feelings, but he knows people aren't home. They are but quite brushes and unsaid whispers. There's numbness from diving into the motion of memories he did not collect. All Harry's dreams are of war and they are red red red. Red with love. Red with splattered blood. Red with looming death._ _ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another Update!! Hope you like it!


	5. Chapter 4

Harry with all his leaking memories finds himself heaving in an empty room. Hermione and Ron suddenly come bursting open the door to ask him if he was okay to which Harry hides. He is not okay, but it is not the time to say otherwise. 

Harry, Ron, and Hermione momentarily have an unimpeded view out of the window. Draco Malfoy appears to be hurrying in the streets alone. As he passes the Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes, he glances over his shoulder only to move beyond the scope of the window in seconds. 

"Wonder where his mummy is?" says Harry, frowning. 

"Given her the slip by the looks of it," says Ron. 

"Why though? "

Harry does not answer Hermione. Harry is thinking too hard. Narcissa Malfoy will not let precious son out of her sight willingly; Malfoy must have made some real effort to free himself from her clutches. 

Harry, knowing and loathing Malfoy, is very sure that he is not innocent. He has felt fear when he saw The Dark Lord has risen from his grave. He has trauma steal an entire month of his memories. 'The Chosen Ones' always have broken hearts and tragic backstories, so maybe he is doing all right now. 

"Get under here, quick," Harry pulls his Invisibility Cloak out of his bag. 

"Oh, I don't know Harry," says Hermione, looking around uncertainty. 

"Come on." Urges Ron and nobody notices them vanish. Maybe Harry Potter always has been this invisible if he wasn't destined to serve a purpose, Harry thinks, but he tucks that thought to mull over later. 

"He was going in that direction, " Whispers Harry as quietly as possible. They scurry along, peering left and right, through shop windows and doors, until Hermione points ahead. 

"That's him, isn't it? " She murmurs."Turning left? "

"Big surprise, " Says Ron in a hushed voice. 

Malfoy has glances around, then slides into the Knockturn Alley, and then moves out of sight. 

"Quick, or we'll lose him. " Harry urges them to speed up. 

Knockturn Alley, the street particularly devoted to the dark side, looks completely deserted. They stand still with Hermione's tug at Harry's hand and a whisper of "Shh! Look, he's in there! " In Harry's ears. 

They draw level with the only shop in Knockturn Alley that Harry had ever visited but somehow he can count his visits in numbers more than once. He feels like his hands have once wiped the dust off a book as he had opened it to find immortality. He is relieved to be under the cloak 'cause he's more scared to see his reflection than being found out. He does not look at himself in the mirror for sometimes he is afraid that it is not him who stares back. Sometimes he's afraid that he has to live with the horrors of some else's doings, sometimes he's afraid he will see a love in his eyes he doesn't want to recognize.

There in the middle of the cases full of skulls and old bottles stands Draco Malfoy with his back to them, just visibly beyond the very same large black cabinet in which Harry had once hidden to avoid the Malfoys. Malfoy is talking animatedly as he constantly moves his hands. The proprietor of the shop, an oily haired stopping man stands facing Malfoy, sporting an expression who represents both resentment and fear at the same time. 

"If only we could hear what they were saying! " Laments Hermione. 

"We can! ", says Ron, excited. "Hang on, damn! "

He gropes for the couple of boxes he was holding and tries to open it silently and produces a stifled excited noise and says, "Look Extendable ears! "

"Good thinking! " Hemione pats Ron. "Oh, I hope the door isn't Imperturbable! "

"No. Listen", says a gleeful Ron. 

They put their heads together and listens intently to the end of the string through which Malfoy's can be heard loud and clear, as though a radio has been turned on. 

"... You know how to fix it? "

"Probably", says Borgin in a tone that suggests his unwillingness to commit himself to the suggested work. "I'd like to see it though, why don't you bring it here, into the shop? "

"I can't", insists Malfoy, "it's gotta stay put. I just need you to tell me how to fix it."

"Well, without seeing it, I must say it is very difficult a job, almost nearing impossible". Harry notices the owner lick his lips nervously looking reluctant. 

"Oh! 'No?'", without even seeing his face, Harry knew that Malfoy was sneering just from his tone. "Perhaps this will make you confident."

He moves towards Borgin blocking the view of the trio with his slender back. They shuffle to see even more properly, but all Harry can see is Borgin looking entirely terrified, and somewhere in the back of his head he knows he has seen him like that before. He feels someone is letting him very slowly and very abruptly letting him into his stolen memories that he had no account for. 

"Tell anyone," says Malfoy his voice laced with a saccharine threat, "and there will be retribution. You know Fenrir Greyback? He's a family friend, he will come by to pay visits to check up on the work progress"

"There will be no need… "

"I get to decide that", says Malfoy contemptuously. 

"Naturally, naturally...sir. '' Borgin makes a deep bow as deep as he had made once in front of Lucius Malfoy. 

Next moment, the bell over the door tinkles loudly as Malfoy stalks out the door looking pleased with himself but inherently very tired. He sighs. Smiling ruefully, he looks at the place the trio has been hiding and Harry stops breathing fearing to be discovered. Everything is more still than a war pelted ghost town. He can hear his heartbeat. 

In that suspended moment Draco resembles Harry. Boney hands and Haggard eyes too tired to even seek rest. Harry supposes it isn't rest or sleep that they need. As they stare at each other, Harry realizes that both of them are a Plethora of blood-warm shadows looking for an escape. They have always been two sides of a coin, breathing in the rancid smell of bloodshed. Always running from something larger than they can ever conquer. They are boys of war who will cry over a lilac branch and die over a mouth to kiss. History has always been littered with such tales. 

In this moment of suspension, Harry forgets why he did not see more of himself in Draco. Then Draco passes by them in very close proximity as the trip remains frozen at their place. 

Harry turns inside to see the owner without his unctuous smile. He is frozen. He looks worried.

***

By the last week of the term break, Harry was in a state of liquid discomfort and pages after pages of drawing the same man he was scared to acknowledge. Ron and Hermione don't seem to be quite as curious about Malfoy's activities as he was. 

"Do you not care? " Harry snaps. 

Recently Harry has been taken to wondering what might be worse. To be a monster or to be a hero and has concluded as his mind twisted up with green so emerald that he's stuck being both. Or rather chooses to be so. 

"Yes, I agree that the entire Malfoy business has been fishy, " Hermione says a little impatiently, "I can chalk it up to you having a fancy towards that bloke. "

Horrified and a bit aghast at even the thought of it, he stares Hermione down. 

"But, haven't we agreed there could be a lot of explanations? "

"Malfoy's father is in Azkaban, don't you think he would want revenge?" Harry knew he would if he was Malfoy. Boyhood meant withering for both of them. They felt like ghosts separate from their bodies as they watched their bones lay in a green miss and Harry knew, Harry knew past the last break of term, they have never been the same. 

***

Harry dreams. He dreams that somehow someone has rearranged his bones with crushed flowers and broken wars. But he sees himself return to Kings Cross station. To platform 9¾. September has always laced him with an aching joy of returning home. 

Then suddenly there's a blinding pain. There's agony carved into his skin as if he's been stabbed with rusted swords. He turns to see a man standing amongst the students. Silver-feathered fingers. He looks hazy, like a cup of moonlight. There's a careless glint in his eyes and Harry is stuck between trying to look away and being absolutely paralyzed like a prey to a snake. Harry has always seen the world in shades of grey, in fractured patterns of bruises scattered over his body but soul, his breaths they all ache in red. 

He tries to close his eyes but his head, his head spins spins spins. In winding circles. There are no red feathers. No red ashes. No coughed up flowers drenched in red. Only red eyes that looks back at him. There's a hollow in the man's chest and so does Harry. He knows. Somehow he always does. There's death carved into the man's skin of screams that sounds barely human. 

Harry finally takes his eyes down from a mind-numbing Voldemort.

He's cladded in black. He stands with empty eyes and a name that has people quake in their voices. Suddenly Harry's head is a maze with unmapped ideas. Harry has imagined death so much that it feels like a memory and he realizes, his heart skipping a beat, that he would not mind dying in Voldemort's hands for he somehow doesn't appreciate breathing.

His heart was incapable of feeling things he was feeling in multitude. It felt like his heart was being squeezed in a box as he sees Voldemort walk towards him. He is bone-weary, heavy-eyed. There are bags under his eyes and sorrow festering in his ribs. His soul is crippled with a thousand phantom aches and some more. 

He dares not look away. 

Suddenly, there's Tom, nay, Voldemort with Tom Riddle's eyes and a sickness in him Harry wants to name sanity. He has lips the colour of a bloodied bruise. Promises hang from his mouth, pretty as a life from the noose. And Harry? Harry would let Voldemort lay himself on the table, put an apple on his mouth and hand him over a knife to break him down. 

Who knew sacrifices could be this profane? 

Voldemort holds his throat in one hand and his heart in another. my soul he whispers. He touches his scar and it feels of healing. The light slips out of his eyes and slither into Harry's soul. Maybe eating fire was his ambition, but making himself bloody with a love was Harrys. 

But somehow he didn't want to be a tragedy

'Harry'

The voice is sharp, fragile, and smooth. Like broken bottles, one steps delicately over in alleyways. Like it can cut open flesh like an envelope and spill blood onto love letters. The voice is keen. Like it says 'I cut you, and I'm not sorry about it"

"Harry! "

"Ron!" Comes a sharp rebuke, "let him sleep. He has already been through a lot. Do you not know that you should not shake and wake someone who’s having a nightmare? "

"Oh, I'm sorry", whispers Ron.

"Something has changed over the course of the summer. I have never seen him so sad." Says Hermione. Harry holds his breath. He does not want to talk about the flowers growing inside his lungs. He does not want to bring them to light. He wants to let them sit inside and let it fester and rot and eventually let them kill him. All in due time. He doesn't want to speak of them. For there's one thing he wants to be his own, to call his, his pain. 

"It is Sirius I suppose."

"It is as if he's waiting for something. I don't know what, Ron, do you think he's waiting for something? "

"I think he's just sad. "

"Yeah. I would be too. I am. I miss Sirius myself. I can't even imagine what he's going through". Sighs Hermione looking at a sleeping Harry.

There's abrasion on his soul and rust in his chest and keeps his eyes tightly closed to get away from life, to run away to the comfort of his own pain. 

"So you smashed the prophecy? " says a voice. Almost softly. Harry opens his eyes to see a tall, thin, black-hooded, a face so snake-like, white and gaunt with slit, cognac pupiled staring back at him. Lord Voldemort now has a wand pointed towards a frozen Harry. Harry shuts his eyes to hide his heart that has been used too much. 

"I have nothing more to say to you, Harry. " His voice almost lulled him into a doze, "you have irked me for far too long.” lulling him Into a sense of sanity. Into a sense a rest. Into a sense of serenity. Harry craved it from his core and prepared for death. He un-clenches his fingers. 

The war is over now. He smiles. He did not even get a chance at his miracle. Maybe in a different world, he will be able to lick the color from their lips, to bask in the autumn of his voice. But today, today he watches as the stream of light from a high window swallows him up and turns him into a twisted angel who pushed one down to sin. He waits as his fingers taint him blood and colour him the shades of striped carnations that almost killed him. Today, it's not enough to count the constellations in his eyes as they blink out. 

When Harry's scar had burst open, he knew he was dead. It was pain beyond imagination, pain past endurance. But he had felt that before. Felt like his skin wasn't his. Felt his bone ache. He was gone from the Hall and was locked in the coils of a man with red eyes. They felt fused together, bound by pain. 

Harry wonders if he felt Harry's love. 

Harry Potter lays on cold green granite and looks at the blood dripping from his fingertips. He stared up to look at a man who looks like a city drenched in war-stricken rain. There is a sense of darkness dripping from the fringes of his hair. He looks like he can catch a bird out of a bush with his bare hands, only to kill it later. He has a façade of gentleness in him that one wishes they can mirror. 

Harry Potter lays on cold green granite as he stares up at him. A man with marble white skin who looks like he holds all the bad secrets of the world in his palms and has hidden knives in his back for the bitterness he has to hold onto for the rest of his life. 

Harry Potter lays on cold green granite as he stares up at a man who's love may tear Harry open but Harry would love how delicate it will be. Instead of jolting him to care about himself, the man would find an elegant way to help Harry come undone. 

Harry Potter lays on a cold green granite and stares up at the cognac eyes of his salvation and demise. Tom Marvolo Riddle stares down at him.

Harry knows. Harry would know who he is blindfolded for he had made the mistake of thinking Tom's bones were a good place to grow roses even when he knew they were not a garden. Because Harry knows those eyes with such ferocity that they strip him of his muse lay his heart bare. Because Harry knows those eyes that make you feel lonely, like a terminal disease, and erodes your heart with every passing day. 

There is light pouring through somewhere and Tom Marvolo Riddle looks haloed. But Harry knows. Harry would know anywhere how Tom has gunsmoke for breath and rebellion for lungs. And Harry knows, he knows with conviction as he stares up the face of an older Tom Riddle, he would not make it. He knows how volcanoes would get him winded up in a sudden hurricane and he would die a death in quicksand.

Choking and unable to breathe with his lungs on pretty fire. He smelt like sweet perishes and Harry knew his eyes could break bones and suddenly there was a comfort in the thought. His mouth tasted of blood and metal and fire and Harry wonders if this is what he will taste if ever flowers stop growing in his lungs. He wishes the pain of loss to stop. Suddenly Harry questions how Tom’s eyes don't hold the insanity it did anymore, there is shock and curiosity instead. He knows. For he knows how his eyes have looked in that graveyard as Cedric's body lay before him. He knows that those eyes have lost a lot of its insanity. 

Suddenly there is a noise. Like that or a shutter of a broken window in an abandoned house and Harry returns his gaze back to see Voldemort. Not Tom. Not his Tom. Harry smiles ruefully at the irony of calling him his and closes his eyes waiting for death. Everything is more beautiful when one is doomed. The only blessing Harry has ever sought, had been death anyway.

But then the headless golden statue of the wizard in the fountain springs alive, leaping from its plinth to land with a crash on the floor between Harry and Voldemort. 

"Dumbledore", Voldemort breathes. 

Harry looks behind him, his heart pounding. Dumbledore appears standing in front of the golden gates. Voldemort raises his wand to let a jet of green light streak at Dumbledore, who turns and goes in a whirl of a clock.

Next second, he reappears before Voldemort and waves his wand toward the remnants of the fountain. The other statues spring to life and one of that of a witch runs towards Bellatrix, who screams and sends spells uselessly. But Harry doesn't see that. Harry can't take his eyes off the Dark Lord. He can't take the eyes of the anarchy of power. All his ballads are drenched in agony. The chorus melts as the edges of the tempests meet. Harry can't take his eyes off a pair of cognac ones, who looks back in a manner that is almost angelic. 

The headless status suddenly thrusts Harry backward and he feels like he's made of paper skin and watery eyes, of trembling hands and svelte blood. 

"It was foolish of you to come here Tom," Dumbledore says calmly. 

Voldemort does not reply. He sends a killing curse at Dumbledore but misses it. Dumbledore flicks his own wand. The force that the spell emanates forces Harry to cover his eyes for an instant, his hair stands on end as he sees Voldemort conjure a shining silver shield out of thin air to deflect it

A long thin flame flows out of Dumbledore's wand and it wraps itself around Voldemort, shield and all. For a second, Dumbledore has won. Harry feels bruises form in the corner of his conscience and he's terrified if it's his villain fingers that have plunged his way into his own heart and squeezing at his heart. His heart pounds. Like fists on a bag of sand. Like Dudley's paws against his stomach. Over and over. Again. And again. And again. 

For a moment, it seems Dumbledore has won but the fiery rope becomes a serpent, which relinquishes its hold on Voldemort to hiss at Dumbledore as it rears from the floor to strike at him. There's a burst of flame above Dumbledore as Fawkes soops down in front of him to drag him out of the way of a jet of emerald light. Dumbledore brandishes his wand once again and the water surrounding them rises up cocooning Voldemort who suddenly appears to be a dark, rippling faceless figure shimmering and indistinct upon the plinth.

Then he's gone. Leaving Harry alone to kill the flowers in his lungs and drowning beneath a wave he's too tired to go back up. 

"Harry".

It's Dumbledore. Harry is angry and hurt and terrified of touch. Dumbledore angers him by taking away his decision to die, he hurt him as he left him behind with the Dursleys, he terrifies him as his balmy hand touches Harry's. But now he's angry and befuddled. 

He had wished for Dumbledore to kill them both before his flowers could. But Harry knows Dumbledore had always thought not of Harry. Had thought more for the greater good, not just him. 

After the pain had left, Harry had howled. He had howled so loud that if Sirius could hear him he would rush right back. He had howled for loss, for family. For love. For being stolen of death and left with flowers in his lungs and ash coating inside his throat. He was left with a wreckage he calls a body with shreds of sanity which urges him to end it all. 

"Harry"

" Harry, are you all right? You're sweating. "

It's Ron now. He wakes up to him being shaken awake and he realizes he has been revisiting his memories from the cold Ministry corridor. He is shaking. He needs to get up. He needs to leave. 

"Yes, yes, I'm fine"

"Just a bad dream,'' he adds to satiate two concerned faces. He does not want to speak about it.  
“I'll see you two later. " Says Harry pulling out his invisibility cloak discreetly. 

"But, whe-"

"Later." Harry cuts Ron off as he steps out of their carriage. 

The weather beyond the train windows is patchy as it has been all summer. Harry closes his eyes but somehow he can't get rid of the sight of the pure pale skin and the piercing look of cognac eyes which looked sharp as death or perhaps even sin. Harry knows he needs to leave lest he coughs up more flowers. 

An idea occurs to him as he stands in the corridor. A reckless but potentially wonderful idea. He sees Zabini, a tall lanky boy, going to enter the Slytherin six-year compartment and Malfoy will be sitting there, thinking himself unheard by anybody except fellow Slytherins. If Harry can only enter, unseen, behind him, what might he not see or hear? 

The corridors are completely almost empty now. Nearly everyone has returned to their carriages to change into their school robes and pack up their possession. Though he is as close as he can get to Zabini without him touching, Harry isn't quick enough to slip into the compartment when Zabini opens the door. Zabini is already sliding it shut when he hastily sticks out his foot to prevent it from closing. 

"What's wrong with this thing? " Says Zabini angrily as he smashes the sliding door repeatedly into Harry's foot. Harry eventually seizes the door and pushes open. Hard. Zabini still clinging on to the handle topples over sideways onto Goyle's lap. In the ensuing ruckus, Harry darts into the compartment leaps onto Zabini's temporarily empty seat, and hoists himself up in the luggage rack. 

It is fortunate that Goyle and Zabini are snarling at each other, drawing all the eyes on them. For Harry is quite sure his feet and ankle has been revealed as the cloak had flapped around them. Indeed for a horrible moment he thinks he sees Malfoy's eyes follow his trainer as it's whipped upward out of sight.

Harry lays curled up, uncomfortable. He remembers his cupboard under the stairs. His breath hitches. A thick sense of claustrophobic anxiety blooms up in his. His hands shake tries to steady his breath. But this storm of panic has already killed him a thousand times, left words stuck in his throat, his strength hurting him deep inside his soul. Yet Harry can't afford to cough up now. He takes his heavy deep breaths and wishes to ask Dumbledore one day the reason he was left behind at Privet Drive. The reason he was sent back to the warzone.

Malfoy was laying down with his head on Pansy Parkinson's lap staring pointedly at Harry's direction. His eyes look hollow like he has been covered in fairy tale scars. He looks haunted with every other holy thing. And Harry almost catches himself sympathizing. Have his eyes always looked that forlorn?  
The lanterns swinging from the carriage ceiling cast a bright light over the scene. It feels cruel, something in Harry isn't ready to believe that Draco Malfoy could be put up for death just like he is. 

"So, Zabini," speaks out Malfoy, his voice coarse, "What did Slughorn want? "

"Just trying to make well to connected people. " Answers Zabini. 

This information does not seem to please Draco, his lips purse down in disapproval. "Potter, he is invited isn't it? ", Harry's heart thrums as Malfoy sweeps his eyes over the bunker. Has he been discovered? "Oh, precious Potter, obviously, he wanted a look at 'The Chosen One'. But what for? He is ignorant enough to not hide his ankle".

" Hide his ankle, Draco? ", Pansy quips, " Whatsoever could you mean? "

Harry's breath started to get a little harder. His head spins for he knows he has been discovered. For he knows he can not trail Draco anymore. His mouth tastes of bile and blood.

Malfoy sinks back across her lap and allows her to resume stroking his hair. 

"Nothing, nothing pretty Pansy. Anyway, I pity Slughorn's taste. Maybe he's going a bit senile. Shame, my father always said he was a good wizard in his age. Slughorn probably hasn't heard I'm on the train, or…. "

"I would not bank on an invitation", Zabini states. "He asked me about Nott's father when I first arrived. They used to be old friends, apparently, but when he heard he'd been caught at the ministry, he didn't quite look happy about it. Nott didn't get an invitation either, I don't think Slughorn's interested in Death Eaters."

Malfoy looks angry but forces out a humorless laughter. He then yawns ostentatiously and proceeds to say, "I might not even be in Hogwarts next year, what does it matter to me if some fat old man likes me or not? "

Harry counts his heartbeat and stares dead into the eyes of Malfoy who appears to be staring blankly at the bunker. He almost looks pasty white in the ceiling lights 

"What do you mean you won't be here next year?" Pansy says indignantly, ceasing her grooming altogether. 

"Well you never know, " Says Malfoy with a ghost of a smirk on his lips. "I might have… er… moved on to better… bigger things ".

Cramped in the luggage rack Harry's heart begins to race. What would Hermione and Ron say to this? Should he inform Dumbledore? Would he know? Would it be worth it? 

Grabbe and Goyle gape at Malfoy and appears to have no inkling to move on to any plans. Pansy resumes the slow stroking of Malfoy's hair, looking dumbfounded. 

"Do you mean…. "

Malfoy shrugs. 

"When the Dark Lord takes over, is he going to care how many OWLs or N.E.W.T.S anyone has got? Of course he isn't. It'll be all about the kind of service he received. The level of devotion he was shown".

"And, you think you'll be able to do something for him? " Zabini smarts. "Sixteen year old and not even fully qualified yet? "

"Potter too is sixteen years old and the old buffoon of a headmaster is sending him to fight against the Dark Lord. But I have said enough, haven't I?" Malfoy continues. His voice goes quiet as if he already has some bleeding memories. "Maybe he doesn't care if I'm not qualified. Maybe the job he wants me to do isn't something that one needs any qualifications for."

Draco looks up. Harry asks himself again what is more unfair than having to choose between being a monster or being a hero? As Harry stares down at Draco's vacant eyes, he realizes that maybe it is when you have to be both. 

"I can see Hogwarts", Malfoy clears his voice. "We'd better get our robes on. "

Harry is so busy staring at Malfoy, he does not notice Goyle reaching up for his trunk; as he swings it down, it hits Harry hard on the side of the head. He lets out an involuntary gasp of pain, and Malfoy looks up at the luggage rack, frowning. 

Harry is certain by now that Malfoy knows that he's there, but Harry isn't afraid of this. But he still doesn't very much like the idea of being discovered hiding under the invisibility cloak by a group of unfriendly Slytherins. Eyes still watering and head still throbbing, his blood pulses with the curiosity of why has Malfoy not dragged away his cover? 

Goyle throws the door open and marches on. Crabbe and Zabini follow. 

"You go on", Malfoy tells Pansy who is waiting for him with her hand held out as though hoping he would take it. "I just want to check something".

Pansy leaves. Now Harry and Malfoy were alone in the compartment. Malfoy moves over to the doors and lets down the blinds. He then bends down over his trunk and opens it as if looking for something. 

Harry peers down over the edge of the luggage rack, his heart pumping a little faster. What is Malfoy hiding from even Pansy? 

_"Revelio" ___

__Without warning Malfoy points his wand at Harry and as his Invisibility cloak falls aside. As though in slow motion he topples out of the luggage rack and falls with an agonizing, floor shaking crash._ _

__"I thought so," Malfoy says jubilantly, "I saw your ankle Potter, pretty, might I add." He looks down at Harry's trainers," And I heard when Goyle's trunk hit you."_ _

__Draco looks more like a pasty white bimbo than he actually is, Harry concludes even out of his pain._ _

__"You didn't hear anything I care about, Potter."_ _

__He drags him up in a standing position and Harry is almost vexed at how tall Malfoy is._ _

__"See you around. " He says quietly and leaves Harry hanging with all his whys._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Another chapter updated! Hope you all like it! Thank you so much for all the comments and kudos!!


	6. Chapter 5

"The very best of evenings to you, " Speaks out a voice as the talk and laughter echoing around the Great Hall dies away in an instant reminding Harry of a war called to an end. Dumbledore has gotten to his feet on the staff table. 

"What happened to his hand? " Gasps Hermione. 

She appears not the only one to notice Dumbledore's right hand to be as blackened and dead-looking at it had been on the night he had met Harry near the small coffee shop. Harry does not like to think much of that night or tries not to but his old journal filled with charcoal speaks to stories in a different language. 

"Nothing to worry about… " Dumbledore says airily. "Now to our new students… welcome, and to our own students, welcome back! Another year full of magical education awaits you… "

"His hand was probably worse than this when I saw him over summer, " Harry whispers to Hermione. "I thought he would have cured it by now, though… or Madame Pomfrey would have done it"

"It looks like it has died, like someone has mummified it", Hermione speaks back in a whisper, with a nauseated expression, "But there are some injuries you can't cure… old curses… there are poisons without antidotes… "

"We are pleased to welcome a new member of staff this year, professor Slughorn", Slughorn stands up, his bald head gleaming in candlelight, his big waistcoated belly casting the table into shadow- " Is a former colleague of mine who has agreed to resume his old post of Potion master."

"Potions? "

The word echoes all over the Hall as they wonder whether they have heard right. 

"Potions? " Says Ron and Hermione together, and turns towards Harry, "but you said-"

"Professor Snape, meanwhile ", continues Dumbledore, raising his voice so it carries over the muttering, "will be taking the position of Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. "

"No! ", Harry was staring at the stuff table. How could Snape be given the position of the defense against the dark arts professor? After all this time? Hasn't it widely known that he was not to be trusted or did Dumbledore not care for him at all? 

" But, Harry, you said that Slughorn was going to be teaching Defense against the Dark Arts! ", insists Hermione. 

" I thought he was! ", says Harry, racking his brain to remember when Dumbledore had told him this, but now that he comes to think of it, he is unable to recall Dumbledore ever telling him what Slughorn would be teaching. 

"Well, that is one good thing, " Says Ron savagely. "Snape will be gone by the end of the year. "

"Whatever could you possibly mean? " Asks Hermione. 

"That job's jinxed. No one lasted more than one year… remember Quirrel? Harry quited him while he was still in his office. Personally, I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for another death."

"RON!", Hermione exclaims out loud, shocked and reproachful. 

Harry tries to rationalize his breathing. He is tired. He is tired of decaying. Of having the blood of a man in his hand since he was barely eleven.

He wants a dissolution so quiet that even the rainbows can not feel. He wishes that his touch be so bright but he is terrified about everything turning to ash. Every time he remembers how he has killed a man at the age of mere eleven, an unknown danger rises from his stomach to his throat. It makes his cheek flush and throat scratchy. It makes his stomach churn and his hands clammy. 

For he killed a man when he was merely eleven, they applauded him for it. For he killed a man when he was merely eleven, Harry started washing blood off his hands every time he even looked at them. For he killed a man when he was merely eleven, Harry forgot what it was to touch someone. 

"He might just go back to teaching potions at the end of the year. ", says Hermione reasonably. "Professor Slughorn might not want to stay long term. Moody didn't. "

Dumbledore clears his throat. The entire great Hall had been corrupted in the buzz of conversation at the news that Snape has finally achieved his heart's desire. 

"Now, as everybody in the Hall knows, Lord Voldemort and his followers are once more at large and gaining strength"

Harry feels decayed at the sound of his name. His lungs are full of thorns and mildews. His bones feel held together by vines. He feels fragile. He wants them to be gentle with his corpse. 

The silence seems to tauten and strain as Dumbledore speaks. Harry glances at Malfoy. He is not looking at the Headmaster but seems to be making his fork hover in midair with his wand, as though he finds the Headmaster's words unworthy of his attention. Harry wonders why did Draco not hurt him when he had the chance. He wonders why he sees so much of himself in Draco. Malfoy looks paler than before, the dark circles under his eyes are even more visible. He reminds Harry of one Regulus Black that Sirius mentioned his father was so fond of. He looks like he wants to disappear. 

"What really happened when you left?" Ron asks once they were at the back of the throng pressing out of the Great Hall, and out of earshot of everyone else. 

"Listen to what he was saying before they walked out of the compartment-"

"He didn't find out that you were there, right? "

"No."

Harry expected Ron to be stunned by Malfoy's boasts. With what Harry considers pure pigheadedness, Ron, however, was unimpressed. 

"Come on, Harry, he was just showing off to Parkinson…What kind of mission would You know who would give him? "

"How'd you know Voldemort doesn't need anyone at Hogwarts? It would not be the first-"

"I wish you'd stop saying that name, Harry. " Says Ron reproachfully. 

Miffed by the continuous dismissal by Ron, Harry let it go.

***

"Do you remember me telling you we are practising nonverbal spells, Potter? "

"Yes", says Harry stiffly. 

" Yes, sir. "

"There is no need to call me 'sir', Professor". 

" Detention, Saturday night, my office " Snaps Snape "I do not take cheek from anyone Potter… not even the Chosen one. Especially not him. "

The words had escaped him before he knew what he was saying.

"You should not have said it ", Hermione says frowning. "What made you? "

"He tried to jinx me, in case you didn't notice". Fumes Harry. It was surely one thing to respect the Dark Arts as a dangerous enemy, another to speak of them, as Snape has been doing throughout the class. He was speaking of it, of Voldemort, with loving care in his voice. " I have had enough of that during those Occlumency lessons! Why doesn't he use another guinea pig for a change? What's Dumbledore playing at anyway, letting him teach Defense? Did you hear him talking about the Dark Arts? He loves them. All those unfixed, indestructible stuffs-"

"Well, " Hermione cuts him off, "I thought he sounded a bit like you. "

"Like me? "

"Yes, when you were telling us what it is like to face Voldemort. " Harry's heart rate picks up. Like someone has left teeth marks of I love yous on his collarbones and he feels bare to the world. Like laced pattern imprints. Like blood in the moonlight. He fears his feelings has been laid bare. 

"Harry, hey Harry! "

Harry looks around to see Jack Sloper, one of the beater's of last year's Gryffindor Quidditch team, hurrying towards him with a role of parchment. He breathes a sigh of relief. 

"For you, " Panted Sloper. "Listen, I heard you are the new captain. When are you holding trials? "

"I'm not sure yet, " Says Harry, "I'll let you know? "

"Oh right, I was hoping I'd be this weekend-"

But Harry isn't listening to him anymore for he recognizes the thin slanting writing on the parchment. He almost snatched the parchment paper from his stopping Sloper in the middle of his words. 

_𝓓𝓮𝓪𝓻 𝓗𝓪𝓻𝓻𝔂, 𝓘 𝔀𝓸𝓾𝓵𝓭 𝓵𝓲𝓴𝓮 𝓽𝓸 𝓼𝓽𝓪𝓻𝓽 𝓸𝓾𝓻 𝓹𝓻𝓲𝓿𝓪𝓽𝓮 𝓵𝓮𝓼𝓼𝓸𝓷𝓼 𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓼 𝓢𝓪𝓽𝓾𝓻𝓭𝓪𝔂. 𝓚𝓲𝓷𝓭𝓵𝔂 𝓬𝓸𝓶𝓮 𝓪𝓵𝓸𝓷𝓰 𝓽𝓸 𝓶𝔂 𝓸𝓯𝓯𝓲𝓬𝓮 𝓪𝓽 8 𝓟𝓜. 𝓘 𝓱𝓸𝓹𝓮 𝔂𝓸𝓾'𝓻𝓮 𝓮𝓷𝓳𝓸𝔂𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝔂𝓸𝓾𝓻 𝓯𝓲𝓻𝓼𝓽 𝓭𝓪𝔂 𝓫𝓪𝓬𝓴 𝓲𝓷 𝓼𝓬𝓱𝓸𝓸𝓵. ___

___𝓨𝓸𝓾𝓻𝓼 𝓼𝓲𝓷𝓬𝓮𝓻𝓮𝓵𝔂, _  
_𝓐𝓵𝓫𝓾𝓼 𝓓𝓾𝓶𝓫𝓵𝓮𝓭𝓸𝓻𝓮. _  
_𝓟. 𝓢. 𝓘 𝓮𝓷𝓳𝓸𝔂 𝓪𝓬𝓲𝓭 𝓹𝓸𝓹𝓼. ________ _

________Harry didn't realize that he had walked away from Sloper when Ron's question shakes him out of his focus._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"He enjoys Acid Pops? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"That's the password to get past the gargoyle into his office."_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________He, Ron, Harry spends the whole of break speculating on what Dumbledore will teach 'Harry. Ron thinks it is most likely to be spectacular jinxes and hexes of the type that the Death Eaters would not know. Hermione supplies and corrects Ron on how those things were illegal and that Dumbledore would teach Harry advanced defense magic._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________A little later than Harry would really like, he finds himself in front of the potions class. The dungeon was, most unusually, already full of vapours. Ron, Hermione, Ernie, a Hufflepuff and himself finds themselves seated nearest to the gold coloured cauldron that was emitting one of the most seductive smells Harry has ever inhaled. Somehow it reminds him of lemon grass, old library books and of fresh rain on cold stone._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Drawn by it, he tries to gulp it down some more and suddenly he doubles down with repulsion. He feels like someone is forcing him to pick up shattered glasses and ordering him to find new names for old heartaches. He feels like someone is digging hatred out of his bones with a carving knife._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________His lips feel wet and tries to rub his sweat off and only to find it to be blood. He hears Hermione's are you okays, but he is stuck on striped carnations. Someone has squeezed at his heart and hatred drips down his nose red and wet as arrowheads. Wind chokes his lungs, heart faltering like flesh and blood that has been too caught up in a town too ghostly. Harry tries to grasp at anything and clutch it to his chests whispering why can't I breathe? why can't I breathe?_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________He swallows his pain, his love, his hatred down._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Now then, now then, now then, " Says Slughorn, "scales out, everyone, and potion kits, and don't forget your copies of Advanced Potions Making. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Sir? ", Ron raises his hand._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________" Yes? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"I haven't got a book or scales or anything- nor's Harry- we didn't realize we would be able to do the N.E.W.Ts, you see… "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Harry, m'boy", Slughorn tuts, "Professor McGonagall did mention… not to worry, my dear boy, not to worry at all. You can use ingredients from the store cupboard today, and I'm sure we can lend you some scales today, " Directing all these words towards Harry. Turning towards Ron, he mentions, " We have got a small stack of old books, they'll do until you can write to Flourish and Blotts."_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Slughorn strides over to a corner cupboard and after a moment of foraging, with two very battered-looking copies of Advanced Potions Making by Libatius Borage, which he gives to Harry and Ron along with two sets of very tarnished scales._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Now then, " Says Slughorn, returning to the front of the class, "I've prepared a few potions for you to have a look at, just out of curiosity and interest, you know. These are the things you ought to be able to make after completing your N.E.W.Ts. You ought to have heard of 'em, even if you haven't made them yet. Anyone tell me what this one is? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________He indicates to the cauldron nearest to the one to the Slytherin table, the one which looks like plain boiling water._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Hermione's well-practised hand rises up as she answers Veritaserum._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"It's a colourless, odourless potion which forces the drinker to tell the truth,'' she adds._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________" Very good, very good,'' says Slughorn happily, continuing to ask about a potion which looked like poly juice potion. Harry does not think much about the year he did drink it. When his skin was bare and vulnerable. For he had fallen in love with claws and teeth and the flowers in his lungs were proof enough of it._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Excellent, excellent- and now this one… yes, my dear? " Slughorn looks bemused. It is Hermione again._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"It's Amortentia."_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"It is indeed. It almost seems foolish to ask, " Says Slughorn, who looks mightily impressed," but I assume you already know what it does? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"It is the most powerful love potion in the world. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________And Harry's world shatters._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________The moment was all.  
The moment was enough. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________He staggers back. There's infrared silence. And he is filled with rage and hatred so intense, in so sudden a burst that it feels like his exposed knucklebones would show up with fractured patterns._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Harry feels trapped in someone else's hatred. Inside his body like splinters stuck under the skin. His mouth tastes of abhorrence like that of an angel in exile. He feels confined within a feeling like an overturned bowl of blood. He trembles. There's a stampede in his blood that unworks him._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"-quite right, you've recognized it, I suppose, by its distinctive mother of pearl sheen? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"And the steam rising in characteristic spirals", Hermione appears to be saying. Harry tries to listen to her every word, meditate upon it. He tries to unclench his jaws and fists and swallow down the blood that wants to drip red. "And it's supposed to smell differently to each according to what attracts us. And I can smell freshly mown grass, and fresh parchment… "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________She stops as she lets her cheeks be coloured. Harry is too wary to be in a place for jests. He looks up and finds Malfoy staring at him, with one of his perfectly trimmed eyebrows arched. Did he notice Harry's panic? Was it evident? Did he know? A thousand and one questions plagues Harry._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Draco tilts his head up as if almost to ask if everything was fine. And Harry nods back pondering about their recent endeavours. Was he really trying to befriend Harry again? Did he have any ulterior motive? Was he trying to be Harry's confidante to whisper back in Voldemort's ears? Harry knows not, but he knows that Draco too, is tired. Both Harry and Draco, no matter what sides they were in, will have to pull bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes. And one day it would be their time, both of theirs. Harry thinks, maybe, just like him, Draco too can hear the war roars._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Amortentia doesn't really create love, of course. It is impossible to create or manufacture or imitate love. No, this will simply cause a most powerful obsession or infatuation. And one born out of effects of Amortentia, probably can't feel love, but as I said, since it really can't help create love, infants born out of it might as well be lacking some love. It is probably the most powerful and dangerous potion in the class."_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Malfoy looks away and speaks Secretively to Notts. "When you have seen as much life as me, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love". Slughorn continues, " And now, let's start our work. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Sir, you haven't told us what that one is", points out Notts, directing at a small black cauldron standing at Slughorn's desk. The potion within the cauldron appears to be splashing about although not splashing even a bit. Maybe if Harry can himself to be fascinated by all the magic around he can drag his mind out._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Oho,'' Slughorn says rather dramatically. "Yes, well, that one, ladies and gentlemen, is Felix Felicis. Miss Granger?"_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Liquid luck. " Hermione says excitedly, "it's liquid luck. It makes you lucky. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________The whole class appears to sit up straighter. Malfoy appears to be giving Slughorn his full and undivided attention._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Quite right, take ten points, Miss Granger, " Slughorn muses delightfully, "it's a funny little potion, Felix Felicis. Desperately tricky to make, and disastrous to get wrong. However, if brewed correctly, as it has been, you'll find that all your endeavours tend to succeed… well, till before the effects wear off. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"And that, "says Slughorn "is what shall be the prize. So, how are you to win this fabulous prize? By brewing me a perfect little veil of Draught of Liquid Death. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________There's scraping everywhere, but Harry is too busy looking at the scribbles all over the pages left by the previous owner so that the margins were as black as the printed portions. The handwriting seemed eerily similar and with a jilt of breath, Harry realizes that he has seen this before, for six years, every day in Potions class. This could be none but Snape's handwriting._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________ _ _ _ _ _ _

________He scruffs through pages trailing after another familiar handwriting. He has the carves of each letter memorised. Because he knows, because he feels the familiarity of the handwriting under his skin. It breathes with him, holding his heart. He has mourned many a loss and traced the letters over and over again to feel the warmth of family to not know who this errant handwriting belongs to. Petite, cursive, elegant._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Familiarity rips up his flesh and reveals to him the dreamy, voidless haze of nearness. Harry traces the handwriting of this one beautiful cursive he finds alongside the scribble of Snape's. Harry finds Lily Potter in an old dusty Advanced Potions book. Harry finds his mother as a tear rolls down his cheeks._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________***_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"And time's up… up! " Calls Slughorn. "Stop stirring please. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Slughorn moves slowly amongst the tables peering at cauldrons. He makes no comments but occasionally stirs the potion or gives it a sniff. At last, he reaches Harry, Ron and Hermione's table and smiles ruefully at Ron's tar-like potion. At Hermione's potion, he gives an approving nod. Then he reaches Harry, and a look of incredulous delight spreads all over his face._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"The clear winner! " He cries out to the dungeon. "Excellent, excellent, Harry, it's clear you inherited your mother's talent. She was a dab hand at Potions, Lily was. Here you are, then, here you are- one bottle of Felix Felicis, as promised, and use it well. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Harry clamps onto the tiny cauldron. It isn't his win. He wasn't fair. But he smiles, it was as if his mum was talking to him and a friend of hers with whom she was close enough to write in his books. The realization almost but stupefies him. Severus Snape and Lily Evans had once been friends. He chokes on unclaimed memories, the ghost in his chest plant dead flowers in the crevices of his spine. But he's happy today. He felt his mum with him._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________ _ _ _ _ _ _

________***_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"How did you do that? " Hermione whispers once they are seated back in the Gryffindor common room._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________And Harry shows her the book along with a postcard Harry always kept with himself. It was the one that Sirius had gifted him, the one where he begrudgingly followed the couple and lily forced him to take lots of pictures. It had a tiny inscription by Lily. Hermione sits dumbfounded with a myriad and one emotion crossing her face before she stands up and hugs Harry._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Harry remembers having nothing but frayed lungs, for it hurts, ithurtsithurtsithurts, but Harry knows that even if Hermione does not understand, she will be here for him, forever. He holds her closer, almost afraid of holding her too close, for he still remembers Quirrel. He remembers how he killed a man._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"You two carry on, don't let me spoil the fun", comes a snarky voice and Harry and Hermione separates at an instant. Perplexed, Harry looks at Hermione, who shakes her head, apparently as nonplussed as he is._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________" What's the problem, Ron? " Harry inquiries_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Problem? No problem at all. There's no problem, "says Ron, still refusing to look at Harry, "not according to you both anyway. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________He kicks a chair aside and sits down on the sofa._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Well, you've obviously got a problem," Insists Hermione, "split it out. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Ron swings his long legs and lays down on the sofa. He looks mean._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"I asked to carry on this little exhibition of affection, we do enjoy a little romance from time to time"._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________" Ron. " Hermione's voice is stern and Harry is tired._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"I'm leaving", Harry mutters and runs out of the common room into the bathroom where Moaning Myrtle keeps his drawing utensils safe._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________" Oh, Harry. Long time. " Her voice is still too shrill but Harry perhaps wants the warmth of a dead ghost today._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Hello, Myrtle. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Are you going to draw him again? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"That's all that has even given me solace. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________So, Harry draws. Harry draws his pure stark cognac eyes. They shine. They look comforting the was despair is. They look sharp of death. Perhaps a bit too terrifyingly sincere is Harry with the dealings of his heart that he carries in his sleeves._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Do you hate him, Myrtle? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Hmm? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Do you hate him? Do you hate Voldemort? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Funny name he gave himself, didn't he? No. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"No? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"No Harry, I don't hate him"_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Why? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Simple, Tom Riddle didn't mean to kill me", her cheeky voice goes morose as she whispers, " I was just there, at the wrong place, at the wrong time. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Collateral damage, is that what you call yourself? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Collateral damage. " She confirms, "you draw his eyes beautifully, he always has been too beautiful, she whispers dreamily, and a bit too cheery voiced._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________" Do you hate him, Harry? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"No."_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Why? He wants to kill you. "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Before he can answer a violent coughing feat wrecks his body. His lungs are blistered and strained as striped carnations grow choking him. He weeps out in gentle strangled agony. The air is thick around him. He chokes and his muscles burn as if his weight is being pulled downwards to the earth stronger than gravity ever can._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________He already is. Harry doesn't answer it._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Harry leans against the walls behind as he sits a little away from the Chamber of Secrets, too afraid to go down, for Harry is certain he is to die._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________He closes his eyes as he crushes the bloody flowers amidst his palms._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Myrtle for once weeps for someone else than her._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Harry crumbles. Ever so slowly. Like history erasing itself. Like monuments falling into ruins. He knew it, and so he believed. He knew it the moment he was touched he would be ruined. He closes his eyes hoping to hold together the carnation petals in his bare heart._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________His heart is a creek shattered and not healed._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Harry feels death warmed fingers trace the veins along his neck. He knows, Harry knows if held harder he would moan out prayers._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"Golden child.  
Lion boy.  
Tell me what it is to fall in love? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________The voice is soft, lulling him to damnation. Harry tilts his head and wonders what it would be to kiss him. The blood on his mouth almost begins to taste like a poem, like religion, like the way Harry wants Voldemort to look at him._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Voldemort traces his fingers feather-light along Harry's left arm, caressing just shy from his palms. "What a shame you fell in love. With me. Hah."_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Harry's fists clenched, breath quivering at the stake of touch. He avoids breathing. He can't bear to move a muscle he does not want to turn and gaze into the cognac eyes. He is too afraid of what he is going to see reflected in the villain's gaze, hideous and warped and cut up like a kaleidoscope._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"I killed your parents, Harry Potter, and yet you love me? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Harry too choked up with flowers wishes for nothing but death._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"I killed them, I killed so many people you loved Harry Potter," Voldemort says. "That's treason. Isn't it? "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Harry can hear his faint heartbeat thudding against his ears._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________"I have written myself across your skin. You're dirty now. Here..." He continues to shift his hand - from the scar across Harry's forehead to one curling along his hand, to the thin white slices upon his wrists. "Here, and here. Everything you've survived, everything you've endured."_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________It is oddly reassuring. Disturbing, but reassuring. Most people just looked like Harry and see his parents._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

______________"Fearless child  
Broken boy,  
Tell me what it is to burn?"_ _

________Absence has always been a transparent House, that even on his path to death Harry can see. And he almost wants to whisper back 'if you suffer, Love, I'll die twice._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________Harry finds himself alone. All his grief says the same thing 'he doesn't deserve, he doesn't deserve any of this'. He wonders if it is all true if his dreams were truly a vision._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________But who would love him? Who could love a boy so broken at the seams? Who will hold his blood dirty fingers and kiss his sadness drenched lips? Who would love his scars and scratches and his disgusting skin? Who can possibly fall in love with his mind filled with anxiety and woe?_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________His dreams feel all too real, his scars a bit too healed and he whispers to himself, in the solace of a deserted washroom, 'I love him.’_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________He stares down at his hands and digs his nails into his palms. "I am in love with Tom Riddle."_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Another update! Hope you all like it! Thank you so much for the kudos and comments!  
> -Carnations
> 
> Leave kudos please, to cheer on the sad sad Harry.   
> -Hamletluvr69


	7. Chapter 6

For a while Harry let everything ache but it's been weeks now Harry has now devoted himself to trailing one Draco Malfoy. With every step, he takes he finds more of himself in Malfoy. He took special notice about Malfoy getting into the room of requirements.

He has taken to checking and rechecking the Marauders Map as he was unable to locate Malfoy on the map and further deducing that the blond must spend quite an amount of his time in the said room. Harry, although was losing hope that he would succeed in ever getting inside the Room Of Requirements, he still, nonetheless attempts whenever he's in the vicinity, but no matter how much he re-words his request, the door remains firmly closed.

"Harry "

The voice is stern but full of care. But the way it is spoken raises the hair on his neck.

"Harry Potter stop right there and follow me. "

Harry looks up to see Hermione standing with her hands folded and something akin to worry and dear etched along her eyebrows. Anxiety settles deep into Harry's heart. He swallows thickly and follows Hermione to the astronomy tower.

"You have been distressed, Harry. I have hardly seen you be happy let alone let loose a smile. What's wrong Harry you can tell me."

"There's nothing remotely wrong Hermione except we are at the brink of war. "

He immediately feels bad, but Harry can't help the snark. He's fretting way too much to keep composure.

"Oh, cut it out, you have been so distant lately. You have been coughing. A lot. I thought you might have caught a cold before but it has lasted longer than that. "

Harry doesn't speak. His heart beating way too hard that he starts to sway a bit. Hermione continues with her observation, too perfect, too detailed. The start student, the best witch of their times, Harry thinks ruefully.

"I have seen bloodstains in your pillow cover, Harry, back in the burrow. I have seen it. I didn't want to approach you, " Her voice is almost a whisper now, "I didn't want to overstep my boundaries. I was waiting for you to tell me on your own. "

Hermione takes Harry's hands and says, "but I can't see you suffer like this, see you suffer alone. "

She says this with so much conviction that tears roll down his cheeks. Her hands are warm in his but it's a comfort Harry doesn't seek. It's not the same warmth he felt when he was standing face to face with him that night when silence was pierced by Bellatrix’s estranged war cries. It's not close enough. Not cold enough a touch.

"Who is it, Harry? "

Harry sometimes can still the memories of vanilla, old books, and lemongrass. See him behind his closed eyelids. And he knows, he knows he can never somehow be enough.

"You know who".

Harry almost wants to burst out laughing at the irony of his words which chokes him. Which makes him scream into his pillow at 3 am with a silencing charm on so as not to wake anyone up. It is also the acknowledgment that makes him burst out crying when he's waiting for breakfast at the Great Hall or the smell of dusty sunlight that makes him miss someone that was never his that he does not know what to do with his hands.

" I knew it. Harry I am so so sorry, he does not deserve you Harry. He out of all people. He who has inflicted so much pain upon you, it had to be him".

Harry sobs into Hermione's chest. It wrecks them both until he calms down and they both stand up. Harry sways a little and Hermione steadies him.

She looks up to her and says very solemnly, the words with so much venom that Harry has never seen Hermione be this scary.

"I'm going to kill Draco Malfoy for not loving you back. "

"What? "

"I will kill that Malfoy, Harry, you know I will. "

Harry barks out a laugh at the incredulity of the situation.

"Malfoy? "

"Yes… he's clearly not returning your love. That's why you have been so obsessed with him, haven't you? You have your head down for forever in the Marauder's map and it's all him that you speak of all the time. I am going to kill him. I'm going to crucio the shit out of that pasty white bimbo."

Harry holds her in his arms to stop her from speaking so much and so quickly.

"It's not him Mione." Says he, strongly to himself and to her.

"What? "

"It's not Malfoy. I'm not in love with him? "

"Then who? " Hermione looks sincerely puzzled. Her face contorts a bit and asks, "is, is it Ron?

" For Merlin's sake, no."

"Then who? "

"Not now. Don't ask me now. But I promise I will tell you. Soon. "

Harry wishes his love could be like a lovely dream. Ephemeral and intangible as they are now, but too easy to be forgotten. He holds her close and sighs into the warmth of friendship and wonders if he will lose it too once he mentions the one he loves.

"Am I intruding again? "

It's Ron.

Hermione and Harry jolt apart as the serenity breaks. Harry shakes his head.

"Are you sure you two? Clearly, something is brewing. Something you don't bother telling me about. "

"Well, it's as if you hardly notice anything these days Ronald. "

"Then tell me why did I walk in on you both embracing each other. Maybe it will be one day too soon that I will see you too snogging in the broom closet! "

"Ron." Hermione warns.

"Is this why Harry Potter was missing from today's quidditch practice? Is romance more important than Quidditch to the Chosen One? "

"I was just going Ron, clearly you can't still be offended that you didn't make it to the team. "

"I would want what's best for the team Harry, unlike anyone who's so self-centered and always so self immersed. "

"What are you insinuating? " Harry snaps.

"All I am saying is that you are too obsessed with whatever is there in your head. And you are taking everything especially this captaincy for granted. Sirius would not approve of this. "

Harry's anger picks up. "What did you say? " He grits out.

"Why are you so obsessed with Malfoy these days? "

"I am not-"

"Oh yeah? We saw what your unhinge obsession leads to. We really don't want another Sirius in our hands. If only you weren't that obsessed with that damned prophecy. "

"Ronald he saved your father. " Hermione is standing almost with a protective stance around Harry. But Harry believes Ron. He believes every word of his.

"No, Harry lead him to his almost death." Harry wants to slice up his wrists and make it bleed more than his lungs do. He wants to set himself on fire. He wants to end it. Because he is tired. He's sixteen and he's tired of becoming the hero.

Harry leaves.

***

Today he is on his quest to see Myrtle and getting some art done he walks into the bathroom to see a haggard Draco being comforted by her. His hands fist by his sides. Harry now knows that some people are sad awfully young. They bruise easier, tire faster, remember longer. Harry finds Draco is one of them. Harry finds himself in Draco.

Draco Malfoy is standing with his back to him, clutching either side of the sink, his white-blond head bowing down.

"Don't, " Croones Moaning Myrtle's voice from one of the cubicles. "Don't… tell me what's wrong… I can help you… ".

"No one can help me., " Laments Malfoy, Harry's pulse stops at the melancholy of his wasted voice. His entire body is shaking, "I can't do it… I can't… it won't work… and unless I do it soon… . ", he chokes up, " He says he's going to kill me. "

And Harry realizes, with a shock so huge that it seems to rock him in his spot, that Malfoy is crying- actually crying- tears streaming down his pale elfin face into the grimy basin. Malfoy gasps and gulps and then with a great shudder looks up into the cracked mirror and sees Harry staring at him over the shoulder.

Malfoy wheels around, drawing his wand up as if on instinct, as Harry pulls out his own. Malfoy's Hex misses Harry by inches, shattering the lamp on the wall beside him. Harry throws himself sideways and thinks up a Levicorpus and flicks his wand, but Malfoy blocks his jinx and raises his wand for another-

"No. No. No. Stop. Stop it"sequels Moaning Myrtle, her voice echoing throughout the bathroom. "STOP IT".

"Crucio."

There's a loud bang and a cistern smashes and suddenly there's water all around as Harry lays down on the floor. Draco's hex has missed him. He is soaked to the skin as his entire body shudders because he can't hold the love he has inside him.

He feels a blue haze of pain wash him over almost like the gentle caress of Death's cold fingers. He feels his love in his mouth and his arms feel no longer his own for it has all turned into muted smoke. His blood sings in absent melodies and crippled songs.

It was times like now that it felt so so hard not to wish for death. He cries because the pain in him is just too much to be held inside. To be hidden. For Harry can't help but clamp his hand upon his mouth for he knows the knowledge of this will be disastrous. Hiccup-y shaking sobs don't mix well with his deformed lungs and he coughs out blood and feels the bloom of one, two, and few too many a striped carnation.

His head hits on the cold floor and Harry smile as blood and spit and crushed petals fall out of his mouth and start to stain the water red. Harry was born with a knife in his hand and a wound in another, so he smiles. He smiles, for he knows his life is nothing but an inflicted echo of misplaced love.

He doesn't feel like a human anymore.

Loving the man is the most exquisite form of self-destruction.

Maybe this summer he would go back home and steal Uncle Vernon's gun and end himself.

"The chosen one is not so special after all. He too falls in love. "

The voice above Harry trembles with fear but is laced with brave mockery and some mock bravery.

Harry counts down his breath as Draco gently hulls his fallen torso up and makes him sit by the sink and slips down beside himself.

Harry doesn't reply.

"Harry fucking Potter succumbs to Hanahaki. Who would have thought?" Draco's voice is weak, but not with malice.

"What would your father say about your potty mouth? "

Draco smiles. It's sad. It's familiar. It's the one Harry has.

"He will fix me. Ready me up. So I look perfect for sacrifice. "

The words are spoken more to himself than to Harry. Both the sixteen-year-olds sit by the sink and stare at a distance. Eyes glazed with love, with rejection, with pain, with war.

"Striped carnations. The mighty chosen one had to cough up something exotic, didn't he? I have never seen it bloom anywhere but back at my place where-", Draco stops abruptly, face darkening with fear.

'Where? ' Harry wants to prompt. But he does not really want to know. Harry already bleeds with too much of a crippled knowledge to want to know just a bit more.

"Who is it? "

"Hm? X"

"Who is it?"

Harry threads his time.

"It isn't me, is it? " Draco sounds a bit horrified, a bit sympathetic.

"Don't flatter yourself Malfoy".

"What? Are you trying to say I am not good enough for the Chosen One to get Hanahaki over? "

"Why does everyone think that? Even Mione did. "

"Because that witch has brains, she's the best of us. "

"So you accept that? Hermione will be pleased."

"You will catch me dead saying it again. "

"So, who is it? If it isn't me, who by the way, will be the best person to die for who? Honestly, Potter, I won't be really surprised if you say the name of the Dark Lord. "

Harry barks out a laughter. Harry wants to tie his feelings to a nightmare and auction it off to his emptiest of memories. But he keeps them here, shackled to the most important chapter of his life as he slowly gives up living with the bloom of every beautiful flower.

He feels like a cracked hourglass, spilling sand from behind his ribs.

"No. No, you don't really mean it Harry. "

"That's the first time you have ever called me by my name"

"Clearly it can't be him. " Draco sounds stupefied with incredulity.

"It is. "

There are moments when words are not enough,  
Draco looks into his eyes and Harry sees nothing but grief and pity in them.

Love has gotten under his skin. It now breathes within as it slowly infects and corrodes his lungs away. Then, of course, it will poison everything else until nothing will be left but a gaping hole of reminiscent 'almosts' and 'what ifs'.Harry's chest heaves. The gasping sobs have died down and all but that is left is his graceless dance with death.

"Why do you hate me, Malfoy? "

"I don't. "

Harry laughs.

"What, I don't. I tried to though. I tried my best. You went ahead and chose measly Weasley over me, Draco Malfoy. I was offended. " Draco means back and puts his head against the sink. "Of course I was offended. "

"Was Master Malfoy not accustomed to being said 'No'? "

"No, no he wasn't. "

Harry finds solace in their playful banter. It grounds him.

"And now? "

"No matter how much I plead to him Harry, he won't take a 'no' from me. "

"Or what? "

"Or he will kill me. And my family." His voice grows a bit paranoid, a bit rustled, "my mother did not do anything, Harry, he will kill her too. He said he will. In front of me. "

Harry feels a cold shiver wreck him. How can his lungs be tangled up in flowers for a man so cruel? He swallows down shame and somehow in his mouth, he feels holy as he gulps down sin.

They sit there for a long time, not speaking. There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and just like knocking out a twelve feet troll, waiting for impending death, is one of them.

"It comes to me as a surprise Potter, that Dumbledore is not helping his favorite pet! "

Harry laughs sardonically.

"What? I thought Dumbledore would come and arm you up against dark spells, but all I see is an armless stick soldier. What will he say if he sees you fraternizing with the enemy? "

"Well, Dumbledore can go fuck himself."

"Harry. Fucking. Potter. Is that a potty mouth? "

Harry looks at Draco. He looks surprised. His face creasing at his laugh lines. Harry had never noticed them before. He has never tried to. Never really given it much thought how humane Draco really was. The cold could numb everything perhaps but grief. Harry remembers reading something about if one could light up the room with pain they would be such glorious fires.

Draco Malfoy would scintillate the place.

Maybe they both have dug too deep into their wells of pain that reflections became blurry and now Harry can't differentiate himself from Draco. Their pained faces have become too alike in this war shadowed a time.

Sometimes Harry wishes to abandon his identity and start again. Because it is useful. Because that way he would survive. But the ache in his hollowed insides tells him how that would never work, his heart sank to his shoes when he realized how much he just could not leave everything behind.

"What will happen to us, Potter? "

There's a stench of surrender in Draco's voice that nauseates Harry.

He doesn't answer.

Suddenly there are footsteps and before Harry can look for his cloak to hide the blood Draco is up on his feet with his wand out.

"What are you doing?" Harry hisses.

"Cleaning up your mess Potter. Be a little grateful".

Harry worries if this friendship which he so desires to keep will end here, but that is a thought for another time now he has to hide.

That is how Snape finds them. Draco looming over Harry with his wand out, where Harry sits in a pool of blood, water, and scattered flowers.

"Potter. Draco. Detention. 50 from Gryffindor and 10 from Slytherin for the inconvenience that I have walked into", says a sneering voice of Snape, and Harry sees red.

He sees Draco being dragged to the sides and whispered words into which drains blood from his pale face making him look ghostly green.

" It's not what you think, Professor ".

They stop. Snape looks at Harry with a smile so dirty that he wants to punch it off his face.

" Then, what is it, Mr. Potter? Do you get to tell me now how to deduce a situation that I walked into? " He taunts", is this your new way to cover up clearly a lost duel? "

"Potter is speaking the truth! "

"Out."

"Out, Malfoy. Ten more points for Slytherin and out. " Snape shakes Draco down holding onto his wrist so strong that Harry knows would leave imprints upon his pristine skin." Remember what I spoke to you off. "

"Hanahaki. The mighty chosen one gets to die for love. "

"You think you know me, do you? "

Harry grits out his words. The grief clutches onto him craving words out of his chest. Angry, nasty wounded words.

"Good grief. Look at you, annoying and attention-seeking. Just like your father! "

Snape says his words so slowly that Harry almost does not hear it. Harry's head spins with anger, with fury, with wrath, he could almost lose himself to the colours of red.

"I'm NOT my father! I am NOT James Potter. You know nothing about me! I did not ask to be born this way. My father was a bully but then he grew up. But I know, I know, Snape, that if he was alive, he would not be bullying kids. Like you do. Like you bully me, Hermione, and even Neville."

"You're crossing your limits, Potter. "

There's a hideous creature that lies beneath his cracked skin that makes Harry want to give as much pain away as he receives. They call him beautifully broken but that hideous monster under his skin roars with anger and whispers to him to spread people into pieces. They whisper to Harry in a voice that seems too loving a sin to be charged guilty for growing flowers in his lungs.

"How could she? " Harry speaks. His voice soft.

"Excuse me? "

"How could my mother have a friend like you? "

Snape looks stunned. He tries to speak but words don't come out.

"How? "

"I saw her writing. In your potions book that you left behind. "

"It wasn't her. "

"It was of Lily Evans, sir. "

"You don't know what you're talking about. "

"No, YOU don't know what you're talking about. You don't know fucking shit, Professor. "

Harry's breath is uneven. He closes his eyes and tries to take in big gulps of air. He remembers Tom teaching him how to. Breathe through the nose for four. Hold for seven and count down to eight seconds.

His memory mocks him for using the tricks of a monster to fight off the evil. But he knows. He knows he can always trust his ways. He knows yet Tom's hand is scarred with death and yet he trusts them completely.

Harry is someone who didn't die when he was supposed to.

"You don't know shit, Professor," Says Harry. He's calm, he's collected.

Snape had stopped breathing.

Harry's head is bloody. And he tastes it in the resignation of a crumpled flower petal. All he can taste is vinegar red. He knows he's afraid. He's afraid all the time. His breath is all burn, mouth all blood, body all blood.

He straightens himself and walks out of the unused girl's toilet where his life and death began leaving Snape behind, leaving sanity behind, leaving all hopes of falling out of love behind too.

Harry leaves.

He doesn't get a detention.

***

Panic, all he could feel was a rush of panic as it washed over him, snapping him out of his thoughts. It was as if he was back at the orphanage, back at the bomb shelters near Wool’s. He closed his eyes and found himself banging on the door begging to be let out, locked inside his own room. The air raid siren blaring outside and the deafening blast of the bombs that were being dropped nearby. He feels like he is someone who did not die when he should have. How strange, he hadn’t felt panic like this in years, it felt foreign but familiar.

He checks his Occlumency shields and he feels a tug in his mind. Realizing that it felt uncomfortably familiar he easily slips into Harry’s mind. He looks through the boy’s eyes and sees red, blood splattered across the floor and feels as if his heart had stopped for a moment. His vision is hazy being blurred by the boy’s tears. He felt like his life was on fire and he was the one who put it in flames. He feels the presence of someone else beside the boy and looks into the eyes of Draco Malfoy.

Enraged he pulls out of the boy’s mind. He had explicitly ordered all his followers not to hurt Harry Potter and if they did they would answer to him personally. He had promised immense pain and torture should the boy come to any harm. He feels another emotion creep up alongside his anger, concern. He has felt concern before towards Nagini when she was injured but he has never felt concern for another human before, he feels like this is the price he is paying for resurrection. Is it because the boy is a Parselmouth or is it because of their connection? His eyes widened with knowledge. Is it even possible? Nowhere has he read of such a phenomenon occurring. The boy is special, he knows this and he will not stop before figuring out how special he is. Harry Potter needs to be kept safe and far away from any danger, if nothing at all Harry Potter would be his to kill, his to hurt. He would need to hold another meeting with his followers soon but before that, he needs to summon Severus Snape and have a long tedious conversation with the potion master.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, another chapter update! Hope you all like it! Thank you so much for the comments and kudos!


	8. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some excerpts have been taken from the Half Blood Prince.

A loud bang echoes throughout the tiny house in Little Hangleton. 

Fear fills up the room. At every nook and cranny of this very small space of Gaunt's household. There's not too much to fill anyway. 

"Father- Father, I'm-" A very pale, haggard-looking woman looks up, panic-stricken, voice wavering, "I'll pick it up."

"Pick it up! That's it, grub on the floor like some filthy Muggle, what's your wand for, you useless sack of muck?"

The woman cowers and somehow looks smaller than she already did before. She makes herself isolated. Isolation has never been safety, it has always been death. There was a maddening fright in her eyes. Obsessive. Incessant. And they looked familiar. Way too familiar. Eerily so. Somehow the pain and suffocation reflected themselves equally well, equally beautiful. 

Harry Potter breaks his heart and lets it scatter every time he looks into the eyes of Tom Riddle. 

Harry Potter broke his heart as he looked into the eyes of his mother. The same pain. The same suffering.The same burning of a soul. 

She looks so thin and hungry. She looks so hungry that it seems she has eaten her own heart.

It had been cloudless, the day Harry had followed Dumbledore onto a narrow dirt track bordered by higher and wilder hedgerows than those they had left behind. The path was crooked, rocky, and potholed, sloping downhill like the last one, and it seemed to be heading for a patch of dark trees a little below them. Sure enough, the track soon had opened up at the copse, and Dumbledore and Harry had come to a halt behind Ogden, who had stopped and drawn his wand. 

Despite the cloudless sky, the old trees ahead cast deep, dark, cool shadows, it was a few seconds before Harry’s eyes discerned the building half hidden amongst the tangle of trunks. It had seemed to him a very strange location to choose for a house, or else an odd decision to leave the trees growing nearby, blocking all the light and the view of the valley below

He wondered whether it was inhabited; its walls were mossy and so many tiles had fallen off the roof that the rafters were visible in places. He thought of asking Dumbledore, but these days he hardly had any answer for Harry. Nettles had grown all around it, their tips reaching the windows, which were tiny and thick with grime. Just as he had concluded that nobody could possibly live there, however, one of the windows had been thrown open with a clatter, and a thin trickle of steam or smoke had issued from it, as though somebody was cooking.

There had been a rustle and a crack, and a man in rags had dropped from the nearest tree, landing on his feet right in front of Ogden, who leapt backward so fast he stood on the tails of his frock coat and stumbled. 

“You’re not welcome.”

“Er — good morning. I’m from the Ministry of Magic —” 

''You’re not welcome.”

“Er — I’m sorry — I don’t understand you,” said Ogden nervously.

Harry thought Ogden was being extremely dim; the stranger was making himself very clear in Harry’s opinion, particularly as he was brandishing a wand in one hand and a short and rather bloody knife in the other.

“You understand him, I’m sure, Harry?” said Dumbledore quietly. 

“Yes, of course,” said Harry, slightly nonplussed. “Why can’t Ogden — ?”

But as his eyes found the dead snake on the door again, he suddenly understood.  
“He’s speaking Parseltongue?”

“Very good,” said Dumbledore, who had nodded and smiled. But somehow it felt hollow. A little bit out of place. 

“Now, look —” Ogden had begun, but too late: There was a bang, and Ogden was on the ground, clutching his nose, while a nasty yellowish goo squirted from between his fingers.

“Morfin!” said a loud voice.

An elderly man had come hurrying out of the cottage, banging the door behind him so that the dead snake swung pathetically. This man was shorter than the first, and oddly proportioned; his shoulders were very broad and his arms overlong, which, with his familiar bright brown eyes, short scruffy hair, and wrinkled face, gave him the look of a powerful, aged monkey. He came to a halt beside the man with the knife, who was now cackling with laughter at the sight of Ogden on the ground.

“Ministry, is it?” said the older man, looking down at Ogden.

“Correct!” had said Ogden angrily, dabbing his face. 

“And you, I take it, are Mr. Gaunt?”

“S’right,” had grumbled Gaunt. “Got you in the face, did he?” 

“Yes, he did!” snapped Ogden.

“Should’ve made your presence known, shouldn’t you?” said Gaunt aggressively. “This is private property. Can’t just walk in here and not expect my son to defend himself.”

“Defend himself against what, man?” said Ogden, clambering back to his feet.

“Busybodies. Intruders. Muggles and filth.” Ogden pointed his wand at his own nose, which was still issuing large amounts of puss. 

“It’s your son I’m here to see, Mr. Gaunt,” said Ogden, as he mopped the last of the pus from the front of his coat. “That was Morfin, wasn’t it?”

“Ah, that was Morfin,” said the old man indifferently. “Are you pureblood?” he asked, suddenly aggressive.  
“That’s neither here nor there,” said Ogden coldly.

That's when Harry had looked into a darker cognac eyes and his heart had skipped a beat and his lungs had grown a flower! 

"Sir- sir, can you not see she hurts. "

"One must not judge so quick Harry. "

"Whatever could you possibly mean?" Harry sounds vexed. 

"She is not too good of a woman. "

The girl with cognac eyes, ragged gray dress looked the exact color of the dirty stone wall behind her. She was standing beside a steaming pot on a grimy black stove and was fiddling around with the shelf of squalid looking pots and pans above it. Her eyes, so familiar, like her brother’s, stared in opposite directions. She had looked a little cleaner than the two men, but Harry thought he had never seen a more defeated looking person in his life and he has stared at himself into the mirror quite a plenty of times. 

“Mr. Gaunt, please!” said Ogden, in protest, and a shared disgust and concern with Harry, as Merope, who had already picked up the pot, flushed blotchily scarlet, lost her grip on the pot again, drew her wand shakily from her pocket, pointed it at the pot, and muttered a hasty, inaudible spell that caused the pot to shoot across the floor away from her, hit the opposite wall, and crack in two.

Morfin let out a mad cackle of laughter. Gaunt screamed, “Mend it, you pointless lump, mend it!”

Harry draws his wand to mend it for her, and screws his eyes shut as he keeps repeating reparo. But to no vain. 

"Harry," Says Dumbledore, firmly, slowly, as if he was talking to a child, "you can not show sympathy for the evil. "

"Reparo", says Ogden. Harry releases a breath as the pot mends itself. 

“Lucky the nice man from the Ministry’s here, isn’t it? Perhaps he’ll take you off my hands, perhaps he doesn’t mind dirty Squibs. . . .”, jeers Gaunt at his daughter. 

“Mr. Gaunt,” Ogden begins again, “as I’ve said: the reason for my visit —”

“I heard you the first time!” snaps Gaunt. “And so what? Morfin gave a Muggle a bit of what was coming to him — what about it, then?”

“Morfin has broken Wizarding law,” said Ogden sternly.

“‘Morfin has broken Wizarding law.’”Gaunt imitates Ogden’s voice, making it pompous and singsong. Morfin cackles again. “He taught a filthy Muggle a lesson, that’s illegal now, is it?”

“Yes,” says Ogden. “I’m afraid it is.”

“What’s that, then, his sentence?” says Gaunt, his voice rising angrily.

“It is a summons to the Ministry for a hearing —”

“Summons! Summons? Who do you think you are, summoning my son anywhere?”

“I’m Head of the Magical Law Enforcement Squad,” says Ogden.

“And you think we’re scum, do you?” screams Gaunt, advancing on Ogden now, “Scum who’ll come running when the Ministry tells ‘em to? Do you know who you’re talking to, you filthy little Mudblood, do you?”

“I was under the impression that I was speaking to Mr. Gaunt,” says Ogden, looking wary, but standing his ground.

“That’s right!” roars Gaunt. “Don’t you go talking to us as if we’re dirt on your shoes! Generations of purebloods, wizards all — more than you can say, I don’t doubt!”

Suddenly there's a jingling and clopping sound of a cart passing by. 

"That was him? Wasn't he? Tom? I hear he has a woman whom he calls darling. So he wouldn’t have you anyway.” Morphin whispers in parseltongue. 

Merope goes so white Harry feels sure she is going to faint. 

“What’s that?” says Gaunt sharply, also in Parseltongue, looking from his son to his daughter. “What did you say, Morfin?”

"She has been waiting upon a muggle. She likes looking at him. '

“Hanging out of the window to look at a Muggle?” says Gaunt quietly.“Is it true?” repeats Gaunt in a deadly voice, advancing a step or two toward the terrified girl. “My daughter—pureblooded descendant of Salazar Slytherin — hankering after a filthy, dirt veined Muggle?”

“You disgusting little Squib, you filthy little blood traitor!” roars Gaunt, losing control, his hands closed around his daughter’s throat.

Merope screams as Morphin drags a knife down her cheeks. 

“I think that will do, Harry,” says Dumbledore. He takes Harry by the elbow and tugs and the next moment they are falling back in his office. 

"Harry, " Anger, pain, sympathy, boils Harry down and he can not bare to stare up Dumbledore. "Harry", the old man repeats. 

" Did you know sir-? "

"Not momentarily. No. "

"What happened to her? " Harry holds his breath. 

"She survived. " He seats himself. "Morfin got three years of prison, Marvolo, six months. "

"Marvolo- that old man was? "

"Voldemort's grandfather, yes. Marvolo, his son, Morfin, and his daughter, Merope, were the last of the Gaunts, a very ancient Wizarding family noted for a vein of instability and violence that flourished through the generations due to their habit of marrying their own cousins. Lack of sense coupled with a great liking for grandeur meant that the family gold was squandered several generations before Marvolo was born. He, as you saw, was left in squalor and poverty, with a very nasty temper, a fantastic amount of arrogance and pride, and a couple of family heirlooms that he treasured just as much as his son, and rather more than his daughter.”

"She was Voldemort's mother", the realization set in. Harry smelt of collapse and sadness. 

" She was. And the handsome muggle, the father, Tom Riddle senior. Being free for the first time in ages, she got full rein to her abilities and possibly used an imperious curse or a love potion to lure the muggle youth. I am sure it would have seemed more romantic to her, and I do not think it would have been very difficult, some hot day, when Riddle was riding alone, to persuade him to take a drink of water."

"So you're insinuating, sir-"

"Yes. You can imagine the gossip it caused when the squire’s son ran off with the tramp’s daughter, Merope.”

Harry felt blisters from the way he spoke of the woman. She was deranged in need of help not being degraded. 

"Within a few months of their runaway marriage, Tom Riddle reappeared at the manor house in Little Hangleton without his wife." Dumbledore continues. 

“But she did have his baby.” Harry asserts. 

“But not until a year after they were married. Tom Riddle left her while she was still pregnant.”

"Then she died. "

"Yes."

"Tom Riddle lived on sir? "

"Yes, Harry. "

“But what concerns me now, Harry, is our lesson.”

Harry feels slightly resentful at this, but watches as Dumbledore pours the fresh memories into the Pensieve and begins swirling the stone basin once more between his long fingers

"Merope was left alone in London, expecting the baby who would one-day become Lord Voldemort.”

“How do you know she was in London, sir?”

“Because of the evidence of one Caractacus Burke,” He swills the contents of the Pensieve as Harry had seen him swill them before, much as a gold prospector sifts for gold. Up out of the swirling, silvery mass rose a little old man revolving slowly in the Pensieve, silver as a ghost but much more solid, with a thatch of hair that completely covered his eyes.

"That's Burke. That's whom she sold the Slytherin's locket too. For 10 galleons. She was poor and hungry and let herself get cheated. "

“But she could do magic!” says Harry impatiently. “She could have got food and everything for herself by magic, couldn’t she?”

“Ah,” says Dumbledore, “perhaps she could. But it is my belief—I am guessing again, but I am sure I am right — that when her husband abandoned her, Merope stopped using magic. I do not think that she wanted to be a witch any longer. Merope refused to raise her wand even to save her own life.”

“She wouldn’t even stay alive for her son?”

Dumbledore raises his eyebrows. “Could you possibly be feeling sorry for Lord Voldemort?”  
Yes. 

Harry does not say anything for some times and then continues, “but she had a choice, didn’t she, not like my mother —”

“Your mother had a choice too,” says Dumbledore gently. Harry's nails dig into his palms, his knuckles turn white, his palms perhaps bleed. 

“Yes, Merope Riddle chose death in spite of a son who needed her, but do not judge her too harshly, Harry. She was greatly weakened by long suffering and she never had your mother’s courage. And now, if you will stand …”

“Nice suit, sir,” Harry is snarky as he follows a young Dumbledore through the gloomy alley of London. Dumbledore merely laughs.

“Good afternoon. I have an appointment with a Mrs. Cole, who, I believe, is the matron here?”

"Yes, that's me", a stout looking woman speaks up. 

“I am here, as I told you in my letter, to discuss Tom Riddle and arrangements for his future,” says Dumbledore.

“Are you family?” asks Mrs. Cole.

“No, I am a teacher,” says Dumbledore. “I have come to offer Tom a place at my school.”

“What school’s this, then?”

“It is called Hogwarts,” says Dumbledore.“I was wondering whether you could tell me anything of Tom Riddle’s history? I think he was born here in the orphanage?”

“That’s right,” says Mrs. Cole, helping herself to what appeared to be some gin. “I remember it clear as anything, because I’d just started here myself. New Year’s Eve and bitter cold, snowing, you know. Nasty night. And this girl, not much older than I was myself at the time, came staggering up the front steps. Well, she wasn’t the first. We took her in, and she had the baby within the hour. And she was dead in another hour.”  
Mrs. Cole nods impressively and takes another generous gulp of the drink. 

Then she said, “He’s a funny boy.”

“Yes,” says Dumbledore. “I thought he might be.”

“He was a funny baby too. He hardly ever cried, you know. And then, when he got a little older, he was. . . odd.”

Harry holds his breath. 

“Odd in what way?” asks Dumbledore gently.

“Well, he —” But Mrs. Cole pulls up short, and there is nothing blurry or vague about the inquisitorial glance she shot Dumbledore over her gin glass.  
“He’s definitely got a place at your school, you say?”

“Definitely,” assures Dumbledore.

“And nothing I say can change that?”

“Nothing,” affirms Dumbledore.

“You’ll be taking him away, whatever?”

“Whatever,” repeats Dumbledore gravely.

She squints at him as though deciding whether or not to trust him. Apparently she decides she can, because she says in a sudden rush, “He scares the other children.”

“You mean he is a bully?” asked Dumbledore.

Harry is stunned at how at an instant Dumbledore put up words to the matron's mouth without any instance. 

“I think he must be,” whispers Mrs. Cole, frowning slightly, “but it’s very hard to catch him at it. There have been incidents.. . . Nasty things …”

Dumbledore does not press her, though Harry thinks he should. She takes yet another gulp of gin and her rosy cheeks grow rosier still.

“Billy Stubbs’s rabbit. . . well, Tom said he didn’t do it and I don’t see how he could have done, but even so, it didn’t hang itself from the rafters, did it?”

“I shouldn’t think so, no,” says Dumbledore quietly.

“On the summer outing — we take them out, they’d gone into a cave with Tom Riddle. He swore they’d just gone exploring, but something happened in there, I’m sure of it. And, well, there have been a lot of things, funny things. . . .”

She looks around at Dumbledore again, and though her cheeks are flushed, her gaze is steady. “I don’t think many people will be sorry to see the back of him.”

“You understand, I’m sure, that we will not be keeping him permanently?” said Dumbledore. “He will have to return here, at the very least, every summer.”

Why? 

Why would Dumbledore even insinuate such a thing Harry could not wrap his mind around. Why would he want to send a young boy back to an orphanage shattered by the London Blitz, in times of war, in times of poverty, when he could be kept safe in Hogwarts. Was Hogwarts not home to all? 

Because he knows the trauma of post-war. He knows hunger. But he does not know how. 

“I suppose you’d like to see him?”

“Very much,” says Dumbledore, rising along with Mrs. Cole.

They pass by a cupboard on their way up and Harry's breath hitches. He knows this place. He also knows what the inside looks like. He knows feeling hungry and cold and knows how to protect himself from the mice. He knows fear. He knows pain. Harry knows he has learnt to lick life off knives for he was not fed it in a silver spoon. Harry knows now that all these are not his memories. 

“Here we are,” says she, as they turn off the second landing and stop outside the first door in a long corridor. She knocks twice and enters

.“Tom? You’ve got a visitor. This is Mr. Dumberton — sorry, Dunderbore. He’s come to tell you — well, I’ll let him do it.”

There is no trace of the Gaunts in Tom Riddle’s face. Merope had got her dying wish: He is his handsome father in miniature, tall for eleven years old, dark haired, and pale, and eyes like that of cognac. Harry gets the urge to cough up but he wills himself to swallow pain, to swallow love, to swallow sympathy, and to swallow anger. His eyes narrow slightly as he takes in Dumbledore’s eccentric appearance. There is a moment’s silence.

“How do you do, Tom?” says Dumbledore, walking forward, and holding out his hand.“I am Professor Dumbledore.”

“Professor’?”Is that like ‘doctor’? What are you here for? Did she get you in to have a look at me?”  
He is pointing at the door through which Mrs. Cole has just left. 

“No, no,” says Dumbledore, smiling.

“I don’t believe you,” Riddle states. Firm, even for an eleven-year-old. “She wants me looked at, doesn’t she? Tell the truth! Who are you?"

“I have told you. My name is Professor Dumbledore and I work at a school called Hogwarts. I have come to offer you a place at my school — your new school if you would like to come.”

“You can’t kid me! The asylum, that’s where you’re from, isn’t it? ‘Professor,’ yes, of course — well, I’m not going, see? That old cat’s the one who should be in the asylum. I never did anything to little Amy Benson or Dennis Bishop, and you can ask them, they’ll tell you!"

“I am not from the asylum,” repeats Dumbledore patiently. “I am a teacher and, if you will sit down calmly, I shall tell you about Hogwarts. Of course, if you would rather not come to the school, nobody will force you —”

“I’d like to see them try,” sneers Riddle.

“Hogwarts,” Dumbledore goes on, as though he has not heard Riddle’s last words, “is a school for people with special abilities —”

“I’m not mad!”

“I know that you are not mad. Hogwarts is not a school for mad people. It is a school of magic.”

There is silence. Riddle has frozen, his face expressionless, but his eyes flickering back and forth between each of Dumbledore’s, as though trying to catch one of them lying.

“Magic?” he repeats in a whisper.

“That’s right,” confirmsDumbledore.

“It’s. . . it’s magic, what I can do?”

“What is it that you can do?”

“All sorts,” breaths Riddle. A flush of excitement rises up his neck into his hollow cheeks; he looks fevered, he looks beautiful. “I can make things move without touching them. I can make animals do what I want them to do, without training them. I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to.”  
His legs are trembling. “I knew I was different,” he whispers to his own quivering fingers. “I knew I was special. Always, I knew there was something.”

“Well, you were quite right,”

“You are a wizard.”

Riddle lifts his head. His face has transfigured: There is a wild happiness upon it, yet for some reason it does not make him look warm; on the contrary, his finely carved features seems somehow rougher, his expression almost bestial.

“Are you a wizard too?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Prove it,” says Riddle at once, in a very commanding tone. Something Harry has imprinted upon his brain. 

Dumbledore raises his eyebrows. “If, as I take it, you are accepting your place at Hogwarts—”

“Of course I am!”

“Then you will address me as ‘Professor’ or ’sir.’” Riddle’s expression hardens for the most fleeting moment before he says, in an unrecognizably polite voice, “I’m sorry, sir. I meant — please, Professor, could you show me — ?”

Harry has been sure that Dumbledore was going to refuse, to his great surprise, however, Dumbledore draws his wand from an inside pocket of his suit jacket, points it at the shabby wardrobe in the corner, and gives the wand a casual flick.

The wardrobe burst into flames.

Riddle jumps to his feet; Harry is horrified. There are shock and rage splattered all over the young boy's face. All his worldly possessions must be in there and Dumbledore set them on fire. Before he can round Dumbledore, the flames vanishes, leaving the wardrobe completely undamaged, but the fire of absurdity and hatred at negligence glows brighter in Harry. Harry is astounded.

“At Hogwarts,” Dumbledore goes on almost nonchalant, “we teach you not only to use magic but to control it. You have — inadvertently, I am sure — been using your powers in a way that is neither taught nor tolerated at our school. You are not the first, nor will you be the last, to allow your magic to run away with you. But you should know that Hogwarts can expel students, and the Ministry of Magic — yes, there is a Ministry — will punish lawbreakers still more severely. All new wizards must accept that, in entering our world, they abide by our laws.”  
“Yes, sir,” says Riddle again.“You’re coming with me?” asks Riddle, looking up.

“Certainly, if you —”

“I don’t need you,” affirms Riddle. “I’m used to doing things myself, I go round London on my own all the time."

"Ask for Tom the barman then— easy enough to remember, as he shares your name —”  
Riddle gives an irritable twitch, as though trying to displace an irksome fly.

“You dislike the name ‘Tom’?”

“There are a lot of Toms,” mutters Riddle.

“Was my father a wizard? He was called Tom Riddle too, they’ve told me.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” says Dumbledore, his voice gentle, but skeptic.

“My mother can’t have been magic, or she wouldn’t have died,” says Riddle, more to himself than Dumbledore. “It must’ve been him. So — when I’ve got all my stuff— when do I come to this Hogwarts?”

"Soon enough. "

"I can speak to snakes. I found out when we’ve been to the country on trips — they find me, they whisper to me. Is that normal for a wizard?”

Harry can tell that he had withheld to mention of this strangest power until that moment, determined to impress. He knew Tom has a thing for a bit of a flare. Pompous even. Beautifully so. 

“It is unusual,” says Dumbledore, after a moment’s hesitation, “but not unheard of.”

“He believed it much quicker than I did — I mean when you told him he was a wizard,” says Harry. “I didn’t believe Hagrid at first, when he told me.”

“Yes, Riddle was perfectly ready to believe that he was — to use his word — ’special,’” says Dumbledore.

“Did you know — then?” asks Harry, finally. 

“Did I know that I had just met the most dangerous Dark wizard of all time?” said Dumbledore. “No, I had no idea that he was to grow up to be what he is. "

Harry has not meant that. Harry had wanted to know if Dumbledore knew how they were treating Tom back here. For being "special". Harry had wanted to know if Dumbledore knew how at night Tom's bed became his basket. Harry wanted to know if they taught Tom what forgiveness tasted like, because his scars looked too fresh, the stitches too sore. Harry wanted to know if Dumbledore himself knew that he would have to save this boy.

"Why did you make him come back here, Professor. "

"Because, Harry, this was his home. He needed a muggle world to come back to. "

Rage flows through Harry's veins. Harry does not need to go back home. For that isn't one. Harry's home has given him nothing but beating hearts, thunderstorms in his chest at the slightest noise. The nightmare that chills him to the bones. Home has never been anything but a moss-covered graveyard. 

Harry knows this was not Tom's home too.

"How do you know, sir? "

"How do I know what? "

"How do you know that it was Volde- Tom who was the mean child? "

"Well, clearly you saw him-"

"I saw a child, sir"

"A problem child, Harry. His powers, as you heard, were surprisingly well developed for such a young wizard and — most interestingly and ominously of all — he had already discovered that he had some measure of control over them, and begun to use them consciously. And as you saw, they were not the random experiments typical of young wizards: He was already using magic against other people, to frighten, to punish, to control. The little stories of the strangled rabbit and the young boy and girl he lured into a cave were most suggestive. . . . ‘I can make them hurt if I want to. . . .’ "

How? How do you know it was not self-defense? For Harry to had set a snake upon his cousin and yet he was not the one frightening, punishing, and controlling people. 

Harry wants to scream instead he looks out of the window. The skies darken and Harry inhales in moss tainted air which spills of loss, of anger. Harry looks at young Tom who feels like Icarus, angry at himself. With a smile full of bloody teeth, he free falls to join the ocean's roar. Harry knows how the story proceeds. Harry knows how his tears sparkle as Tom loses all hope of a savior as the wax burns up his skin to display his pride forever. 

Harry watches Tom shrink who sees the sun do the same, and Icarus falls, his fingers reaching towards the sun for destruction was what he was intended for, for he was not saved. Tom had iron in his bloodstreams which moulded it to ichor and Harry was made too much closer to the universe than God, so all he could do was wait. Wait for stillness to find him. Wait for a softness that only death could provide. 

"You are getting swayed, Harry. " Dumbledore's soft words snap him out of his reverie. 

"I- I just wanted to be in his shoes, professor. "

"Now that is what we must not do. I have known Tom since he was eleven. And compassion is not what I would name my feelings that I have for him now. "

Now, Harry stresses in his head, what about when he needed it the most? Did you show him compassion then? 

"I see Tom has worked his charms over you as well from his grave. "

Harry flinches. 

"To-Tom is not dead, Professor. "

"Tom is. Voldemort is not. "

“And he was a Parselmouth,” interjects Harry, a bit thoughtfully, to carry out the conversation. 

“Yes, indeed; a rare ability, and one supposedly connected with the Dark Arts, although as we know, there are Parselmouths among the great and the good too. In fact, his ability to speak to serpents did not make me nearly as uneasy as his obvious instincts for cruelty, secrecy, and domination."

'So you did not correct him? Sir, he was a child. '

Harry stays quiet. 

“Time is making fools of us again,” Dumbledore murmurs. "But before we part, I want to draw your attention to certain features of the scene we have just witnessed, for they have a great bearing on the matters we shall be discussing in future meetings."

Harry mutters out a yes sir. 

“Firstly, I hope you noticed Riddle’s reaction when I mentioned that another shared his first name, ‘Tom’?”

Harry nods.

“There he showed his contempt for anything that tied him to other people, anything that made him ordinary. Even then, he wished to be different, separate, notorious. "

How did you know he wanted to be particularly notorious, sir?

"He shed his name, as you know, within a few short years of that conversation and created the mask of ‘Lord Voldemort’ behind which he has been hidden for so long. I trust that you also noticed that Tom Riddle was already highly self sufficient, secretive, and, apparently, friendless? He did not want help or companionship on his trip to Diagon Alley. He preferred to operate alone. The adult Voldemort is the same. You will hear many of his Death Eaters claiming that they are in his confidence, that they alone are close to him, even understand him. They are deluded. Lord Voldemort has never had a friend, nor do I believe that he has ever wanted one."

Harry feels nothing but compassion. He sounded like Tom was deserted, especially when he wanted companionship. Loving Tom riddle has always looked like war and no one, not a single person, fought for him. So Harry names his grief in his art, maybe in some other universe, he would name him hope. 

“And lastly — I hope you paid attention to this, Harry — the young Tom Riddle liked to collect trophies. You saw the box of stolen articles he had hidden in his room. These were taken from victims of his bullying behavior, souvenirs, if you will, of particularly unpleasant bits of magic. Bear in mind this magpie like tendency, for this, particularly will be important later."

Dumbledore stares at Harry, for long and Harry, he wishes against hope that his love and hatred does not show. 

"The minister of Magic-" Harry struggles to change the subject, "He’s not very happy with me.”

“No,” sighs Dumbledore. " He is not very happy with me either. We must try not to sink beneath our anguish, Harry, but battle on.”

Harry sits in seething silence, glaring at Dumbledore. 

“So, sir,” says Harry, in what he hopes is a polite, calm voice, “you definitely don't think Tom Riddle could be redeemed?"

“I have been tolerant enough to answer that question already,” says Dumbledore, but he does not sound very tolerant anymore. “My answer has not changed.”

Harry sits there feeling mutinous. How would it be if he refuses to permit the change of subject if he insists upon arguing the case against Voldemort? As though he has read Harry’s mind, Dumbledore shakes his head.

“Ah, Harry, how often this happens, even between the best of friends! Each of us believes that what he has to say is much more important than anything the other might have to contribute!”

“I don’t think what you’ve got to say is unimportant, sir,” says Harry stiffly.

“Well, you are quite right, because it is not,” says Dumbledore briskly. “I have some more memories to show you this evening, they were obtained with enormous difficulty, but one of them is, I think, the most important I have collected.”

Harry does not say anything to this; he still feels angry at the reception but sees nothing to be gained by arguing further.

“So,” says Dumbledore, in a ringing voice, “Well, the start of the school year arrived and with it came Tom Riddle, a quiet boy in his secondhand robes, who lined up with the other first years to be sorted. He was placed in Slytherin House almost the moment that the Sorting Hat touched his head,” continues Dumbledore, waving his blackened hand toward the shelf over his head where the Sorting Hat sat, ancient and unmoving.

“How soon Riddle learned that the famous founder of the House could talk to snakes, I do not know — perhaps that very evening. The knowledge can only have excited him and increased his sense of self importance."

“However, if he was frightening or impressing fellow Slytherins with displays of Parseltongue in their common room, no hint of it reached the staff. He showed no sign of outward arrogance or aggression at all. As an unusually talented and very good looking orphan, he naturally drew attention and sympathy from the staff almost from the moment of his arrival. He seemed police, quiet, and thirsty for knowledge. Nearly all were most favorably impressed by him.”

“Didn’t you tell them, sir, what he’d been like when you met him at the orphanage?” asks Harry, sarcasm dripping off his tongue like wasted poison. 

“No, I did not. Though he had shown no hint of remorse, it was possible that he felt sorry for how he had behaved before and was resolved to turn over a fresh leaf. I chose to give him that chance.”  
Dumbledore pauses and looked inquiringly at Harry. Harry knew Dumbledore always had a tendency to trust people in spite of overwhelming evidence that they did not deserve it. He trusted everyone. Everyone but the one who seemed to need it the most. 

“But you didn’t really trust him, sir, did you? He told me . . . the Riddle who came out of that diary said, ‘Dumbledore never seemed to like me as much as the other teachers did.’”

_"You are a murderer, no matter how beloved you are in your little crazy school Freak. " ___

__Tom? Was that Tom’s memory? He has Voldemort’s memories? Harry jolts. He feels a pang of pain in his ribs like he is reminiscing about a long-forgotten pain. His breath quickens. He sees the door close at his face. He knows the room. He knows now with more certainty whose room it is. He knows he's seeing himself get locked inside Tom Riddle's bed chamber as the war siren blows on and on signaling the blitz._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, another update! This chapter was so long that we had to split it into two parts. The other part will be up soon! We really appreciate all the kudos and comments! Thank you so much!


	9. Chapter 8

"Harry, are you alright? "

"Y-yes, sir. " Harry heaves snapped out of his thoughts. "Yes, sir, I am alright, sir. "

Harry closes his eyes to see the horror-stricken ones of a Tom Riddle. His face is scratched and yet handsome. The horror you have committed is not who you are. 

Harry brims with rage, with grief. He was withering and dying and burning. 

“Let us say that I did not take it for granted that he was trustworthy,” says Dumbledore. “I had, as I have already indicated, resolved to keep a close eye upon him, and so I did. I cannot pretend that I gained a great deal from my observations at first. He was very guarded with me; he felt, I am sure, that in the thrill of discovering the true identity he had told me a little too much. He was careful never to reveal as much again, but he could not take back what he had let slip in his excitement, nor what Mrs. Cole had confided in me. However, he had the sense never to try and charm me as he charmed so many of my colleagues."

“Rigidly controlled by Riddle, they were never detected in open wrongdoing, although their seven years at Hogwarts were marked by a number of nasty incidents to which they were never satisfactorily linked, the most serious of which was, of course, the opening of the Chamber of Secrets, which resulted in the death of a girl. As you know, Hagrid was wrongly accused of that crime. I have not been able to find many memories of Riddle at Hogwarts,” says Dumbledore placing his withered hand on the Pensieve. “Few who knew him then are prepared to talk about him; they are too terrified of the consequences. What I know, I found out after he had left Hogwarts, after much painstaking effort, after tracing those few who could be tricked into speaking, after searching old records, and questioning Muggle and wizard witnesses alike.”

“Those whom I could persuade to talk told me that Riddle was obsessed with his parentage. This is understandable, of course; he had grown up in an orphanage and naturally wished to know how he came to be there. It seems that he searched in vain for some trace of Tom Riddle senior on the shields in the trophy room, on the lists of prefects in the old school records, even in the books of Wizarding history. Finally he was forced to accept that his father had never set foot in Hogwarts. I believe that it was then that he dropped the name forever, assumed the identity of Lord Voldemort, and began his investigations into his previously despised mother’s family — the woman whom, you will remember, he had thought could not be a witch if she had succumbed to the shameful human weakness of death. All he had to go upon was the single name ‘Marvolo,’ which he knew from those who ran the orphanage had been his mother’s father’s name. Finally, after painstaking research, through old books of Wizarding families, he discovered the existence of Slytherin’s surviving line. In the summer of his sixteenth year, he left the orphanage to which he returned annually and set off to find his Gaunt relatives. And now, Harry, if you will stand …” :

Dumbledore rises, and Harry sees that he was again holding a small crystal bottle filled with swirling, pearly memory.

“I was very lucky to collect this,” he says, as he pours the gleaming mass into the Pensieve. “As you will understand when we have experienced it. Shall we?”

Harry steps up to the stone basin and bowed obediently until his face sinks. 

Harry looks around as Dumbledore appears beside him and sees that they are standing in Slughorn’s office. Half a dozen boys are sitting around Slughorn, all on harder or lower seats than his, and all in their midteens. Harry recognizes Voldemort at once. His is the most handsome face, painfully so, transcendence of the self, Keats has said and he looks the most relaxed of all the boys. His right-hand lay negligently upon the arm of his chair; with a jolt, Harry sees that he was wearing Marvolo’s gold and black ring; he has already killed his father.

“Sir, is it true that Professor Merrythought is retiring?” he asks.

“Tom, Tom, if I knew I couldn’t tell you,” says Slughorn, wagging a reproving, sugar covered finger at Riddle, though ruining the effect slightly by winking. “I must say, I’d like to know where you get your information, boy, more knowledgeable than half the staff, you are.”

Riddle smiles; the other boys laugh and cast him admiring looks.

“What with your uncanny ability to know things you shouldn’t, and your careful flattery of the people who matter — thank you for the pineapple, by the way, you’re quite right, it is my favorite."

As several of the boys titters, something very strange occurs, the whole room was suddenly fills with a thick white fog, so that Harry sees nothing but the face of Dumbledore, who is standing beside him. Then Slughorn’s voice rings out through the mist, unnaturally loudly, “You’ll go wrong, boy, mark my words. “

The fog clears as suddenly as it had appeared and yet nobody makes any allusion to it, nor does anybody look as though anything unusual have just happened. Bewildered, Harry looks around as a small golden clock standing upon Slughorn’s desk chime eleven o’clock.

“Good gracious, is it that time already?” says Slughorn. “You’d better get going, boys, or we’ll all be in trouble. Lestrange, I want your essay by tomorrow or it’s detention. Same goes for you, Avery.”

Slughorn pulls himself out of his armchair and carries his empty glass over to his desk as the boys file out. Voldemort, however, stays behind. Harry can tell he has dawdled deliberately, wanting to be last in the room with Slughorn.

“Look sharp, Tom,” says Slughorn, turning around and finding him still present. “You don’t want to be caught out of bed out of hours, and you a prefect…”

“Sir, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Ask away, then, m’boy, ask away….”

“Sir, I wondered what you know about. . . about Horcruxes?”

And it happens all over again: The dense fog fills the room so that Harry can not see Slughorn or Voldemort at all; only Dumbledore, smiling serenely beside him. Then Slughorn’s voice booms out again, just as it has done before.

“I don’t know anything about Horcruxes and I wouldn’t tell you if I did! Now get out of here at once and don’t let me catch you mentioning them again!”

“Well, that’s that,” says Dumbledore placidly beside Harry. 

And Harry’s feet leave the floor to fall, seconds later, back onto the rug in front of Dumbledore’s desk.

“That’s all there is?” says Harry blankly.

Dumbledore had said that this was the most important memory of all, and he could see why, but he had to pretend otherwise. Admittedly the fog, and the fact that nobody seemed to have noticed it, does rouse an added interest in him. 

“As you might have noticed,” says Dumbledore, reseating himself behind his desk, “that memory has been tampered with.”

“Tampered with?” repeats Harry, sitting back down too.

“Certainly,” says Dumbledore. “Professor Slughorn has meddled with his own recollections.”

“But why would he do that?”

“Because, I think, he is ashamed of what he remembers,” says Dumbledore. “He has tried to rework the memory to show himself in a better light, obliterating those parts which he does not wish me to see. It is, as you will have noticed, very crudely done, and that is all to the good, for it shows that the true memory is still there beneath the alterations.

“And so, for the first time, I am giving you homework, Harry. It will be your job to persuade Professor Slughorn to divulge the real memory, which will undoubtedly bear most crucial piece of information of all.”

"What's a Horcrux, sir? "

"A Horcrux is the word used for an object in which a person has concealed part of their soul. Well, you split your soul, you see,” says Dumbledore, “and hide part of it in an object outside the body. Then, even if one’s body is attacked or destroyed, one cannot die, for part of the soul remains earthbound and undamaged. But of course, existence in such a form …”

Harry finds himself remembering words he had heard nearly two years before: “I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost. . . but still, I was alive.”

“… few would want it, Harry, very few. Death would be preferable.”

“How do you split your soul?”

“Well,” says Dumbledore, “you must understand that the soul is supposed to remain intact and whole. Splitting it is an act of violation, it is against nature.”

“But how do you do it?”

“By an act of evil — the supreme act of evil. By committing murder. Killing rips the soul apart. The wizard intent upon creating a Horcrux would use the damage to his advantage: He would encase the torn portion —”

“Encase? But how — ?”

Dumbledore does not answer. 

“I have been hoping for this piece of evidence for a very long time,” says Dumbledore at last. “It confirms the theory on which I have been working, it tells me that I am right, and also how very far there is still to go. …”

“You think he succeeded then, sir?” asks Harry, almost nonchalantly to hide his prior knowledge. “He made a Horcrux? And that’s why he didn’t die when he attacked me? He had a Horcrux hidden somewhere? A bit of his soul was safe?”

“A bit… or more. Four years ago, I received what I considered certain proof that Voldemort had split his soul.”

“Where?” asks Harry. “How?”

“You handed it to me, Harry,” says Dumbledore. “The diary Riddle's diary, the one giving instructions on how to reopen the Chamber of Secrets.”

“I don’t understand, sir,” feigns Harry.

“Well, although I did not see the Riddle who came out of the diary, what you described to me was a phenomenon I had never witnessed. A mere memory starting to act and think for itself? A mere memory, sapping the life out of the girl into whose hands it had fallen? Being able to speak Parseltongue? No, something much more sinister had lived inside that book. … a fragment of soul, I was almost sure of it. The diary had been a Horcrux. But this raised as many questions as it answered. What intrigued and alarmed me most was that that diary had been intended as a weapon as much as a safeguard.”

“I still don’t understand,” says Harry.

“Well, it worked as a Horcrux is supposed to work — in other words, the fragment of soul concealed inside it was kept safe and had undoubtedly played its part in preventing the death of its owner. But there could be no doubt that Riddle really wanted that diary read, wanted the piece of his soul to inhabit or possess somebody else, so that Slytherin’s monster would be unleashed again.”

“Well, he didn’t want his hard work to be wasted,” says Harry, almost fondly. “He wanted people to know he was Slytherin’s heir, because he couldn’t take credit at the time.”

“Quite correct,” adds Dumbledore, nodding. “But don’t you see, Harry, that if he intended the diary to be passed to, or planted on, some future Hogwarts student, he was being remarkably blase about that precious fragment of his soul concealed within it. The point of a Horcrux is to keep part of the self hidden and safe, not to fling it into somebody else’s path and run the risk that they might destroy it — as indeed happened: That particular fragment of the soul is no more; you saw to that."

“How many Horcruxes do you think he made? "

"I don't know. "

“but they could be of any number. They could be anywhere in the world — hidden — buried or invisible —”

“I am glad to see you appreciate the magnitude of the problem,” says Dumbledore calmly. 

“How are we supposed to find them?”

Harry stares at him. Dumbledore stares back as if it is obvious. 

“But surely, sir,” he says, keeping his voice as respectful as possible, “you don’t need me — you could use Legilimency … or Veritaserum. …”

“Professor Slughorn is an extremely able wizard who will be expecting both,” says Dumbledore. “He is much more accomplished at Occlumency than poor Morfin Gaunt, and I would be astonished if he has not carried an antidote to Veritaserum with him ever since I coerced him into giving me this travesty of a recollection."

“No, I think it would be foolish to attempt to wrest the truth from Professor Slughorn by force, and might do much more harm than good; I do not wish him to leave Hogwarts. However, he has his weaknesses like the rest of us, and I believe that you are the one person who might be able to penetrate his defenses. It is most important that we secure the true memory, Harry.. . . How important, we will only know when we have seen the real thing. So, good luck . . ..”

A little taken aback by the abrupt dismissal, Harry gets to his feet quickly. “Good afternoon, sir.”

As he closes the study door behind him, he distinctly hears Phineas Nigellus say, “I can’t see why the boy should be able to do it better than you, Dumbledore.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to, Phineas,” replies Dumbledore, and Fawkes gives another low, musical cry.

Harry walks slow. A mere memory. Harry shares memories too. He could not relax now for the fear of falling apart. If he let go now for a second, he'd go to pieces and they would be blown away. 

Harry is tired of closing chapters, tangled apologizes, and radiant silence pushing him to death. There's a fragment of soul Dumbledore had mentioned. He had also mentioned how Voldemort had parted with his abilities with Harry after killing Lily Potter. 

Harry looks out of the window and steals a shard of painful sunlight. He has memories of Voldemort’s childhood, he is a Parselmouth like him and he shares a mental bond with the man so strong that he can feel Voldemort’s emotions when he is torturing someone. He has seen through the eyes of his familiar. Dumbledore had mentioned years ago that Voldemort, the night he tried to kill Harry had accidentally transferred some of his powers to him. 

Harry remembers Tom telling him how similar they both are. Both orphans left to rot in the muggle world by Dumbledore and both Parselmouths.

A weight leaves his chest, but his heart feels, nonetheless a bit more constricted. Harry steps up quickly to reach Professor Binn's class. He really does not need a history class now, but probably he could it. 

"Professor, may I-"

"Yes, yes, boy, come in. "

Harry sits down in the corner, with the terror of one person aching in one place. 

Where could I rest but in your hurricane? 

Harry smiles at the confusion in his head. Tom would like this. He feels like he's standing in the eye of the storm. His brain is a maze of unmapped ideas and he plots willing, unyieldingly to the blocks ahead and the rain thrums away against the windowpane. 

The inside of the classroom smells of old leather and ancient dust. It’s a familiar feeling, this turmoil. Maybe familiar isn’t the right word, Harry thinks, instead, an unnamed notch settled between nostalgia and the hazy edge of a painful memory. Several of them. He misses Tom. 

If love is a science, which Hermione sometimes says it is, it will be mostly about Tom's hands, holding Harry up as he’s falling. It’ll be about how love is the falling, too, and also the part when Tom catches him, the part where everything is just a rusting in the bloodstream, a sickness of the heart the body never learns how to cure.

Beauty is terror. 

Tom was beautiful. 

There’s a reason there’s always one god for both love and then war, derivatives of human passion are all the same in the end. Violence isn’t love but rather something that crawls backward and ugly out of it, making the heart beat all wrong again. Hey, Tom, isn’t it terrible? How the line is so thin? How fickle it is? Like picking petals from the whirl of a striped carnation; I love you, I love you not.

Harry's thoughts get shattered immediately as a paper swan flies to him. Malfoy, he groans. 

It opens up in front of him. 

"SCARHEAD!!!"

It screams in black ink looking like red blood. He does not miss the sniggering from the Slytherin table, neither does he miss the very tiny postscript swirling a 'meet me'. He looks up at the befriended enemy and nods. What he does miss are Hermione's very very keen eyes. 

_If I kiss you, will I suffer? ___

____

____

Harry had always wondered, but he has suffered none the less. The realization sinks very slowly in Harry like wading through the cut film of a black and white movie; spotlights, stage magicians, the stare that lingers too long before the director yells cut, the color of it buttery with age, grainy as wet sand across the palm as the frames flicker by.

One, two. Pause. Breathe.

The diary of Tom Riddle had a part of his soul, with memories and abilities of parseltongue. 

Harry Potter has a part of his soul, with memories and abilities of parseltongue. 

Harry Potter crumples the paper crane within his fist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, another update! (Continuation from the last chapter!) Hope you all like it! Thank you for all the kudos and comments!


	10. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter summary: sophisticated pain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dialogues in italics are in Parseltongue.

"So, when do we snog? "

"What? "

"We are two young men, out of bed at the dead-end of the night, in the astronomy tower, Potter! "

"Draco-"

"Well, why else are we here then? If you don't wanna snog this beautiful face? "

"Don't you think too highly of yourself? What will happen if your father hears about this? You wanna snog me? "

"I am going to die anyway, Harry. I might as well. Well, I had wanted to. "

Harry looks at the taller boy. He looks ethereal in the moonlight. Courage has never been the absence of fear and perhaps nobody embodies that better than Draco. He uses honesty to be so dishonest. Draco is so very confident, only to distract others from his crumbling core.

Draco Malfoy, standing tall, a headful of starlight hair, is like a fresh flower in a cup full of paper ones. He is like a slice of cold summer.

Harry is sick of losing friends.

He looks out of the astronomy tower. It's beautiful. Harry remembers the first time he ever walked through the doors.

"Well, help will always be given to you at Hogwarts if you ask for it, " Draco speaks breaking the spell, " Are you-" He stops, hesitates, "are you really in love with- how are you in love with the Dark Lord?"

“Am I really coughing up bloody flowers for him? Why Draco, I don't see pudding here. So, yes, yes I am.”

Harry sees Draco’s eyes glaze with growing confusion, still expecting him to say that the Gryffindor was in fact being sarcastic and he was not really in love with the Dark Lord.

Draco stares and stares some more after being confronted by Harry's raised eyebrow in indignation.

“Who in their right mind! What else was I expecting? You’re Potter! Of course, you are going to end up doing something no one would even dare think of. How?”

“You know what? I blame it all on one Lucius Malfoy!”

“What’s my father got to do with all this?”

“I would have never found the diary if it was not for your father. ”

“Potter, for fuck sake! For once will you stop being oh-so vague and dramatic and explain what exactly is going on with you?”

"Why, are you afraid that I would be stealing your job?" Harry sits down heaving a sigh and mutters out a very subdued grumble of words as if speaking mostly to himself. “I...no one knows about this.”

“Of course I know that!” Draco snaps. “You can’t, you simply can not bloody well go around telling people - I want to snog the Dark lord who wants to murder me. This is buffoonery at its finest. You have outdone Dumbledore."

“Do you know what a Horcrux is?”

Draco stiffens in the corner of Harry's eyes. The night darkens around them. The hour becomes a house. And Harry can not leave.

"How, " The blond visibly swallows in the pretense of indifference, "how do you know about it? "

“It was your father.”

“My father told you about… Horcruxes?”

His voice, a whispered shout.

“He did give Ginny Tom Riddles' diary, didn't he? "

"I don't…I don't know what you're talking about. "

"We are both past feigned ignorance, Draco."

"I could not stop him. I Didn't. I did not know the implications. "

"I don't hold it against you. "

"You should. "

"We started off on the wrong foot."

"Are we going to banter throughout the night instead of answering the pressing issues? "

"Well, we got to go back to our roots. "

"Who taught you to argue so well? Granger? "

"You are especially inquisitive about her in recent times, Malfoy. "

"You are in love with your parents' murderer." Draco gasps. "Potter, Harry, you know I didn't mean it."

"Does not stop itself from being the truth. "

A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes within him, Harry wants to break down and cry, or laugh, he does not know.

"Do you remember when I first joined Hogwarts? I did not have many friends, Draco. "

"It's impossible. Everyone wanted to be friends with you… I know I did. "

"You are mistaken. " A scoff leaves Harry despite his will to keep all malice inside. "You wanted to be-friend the boy who lived. Not me. Not your commonplace Harry. "

Draco sits down beside him.

"Neither did I have friends then, Potter. "

"You had minions. "

"Don't make me hex you. "

Harry feels undeniably fond.

"What about that good-for-nothing Weasley? "

"He seems to hate me these days. Back in those days, nobody seemed to understand me. Nobody seemed to see the scrawny abused child. "

Harry carries a handful of shadow from his child: the decay, the hope, the mouth full of dirt, and all one could see in him was salvation. Everything he has let go of has claw marks on it. Harry tells Draco that.

"I found a friend in Tom. Tom from the diary. " Draco holds his hand like he's fragile and Harry wants to laugh at them, their fate, how they are so tender and so ready to die. He felt them to be so old, so awfully old and worn, and so young all at once, raw as a wound.

"Tom knew what it was like to have a broken house and return to it every year." The silver boy's grasp tightens around him. "He did not call me a freak when I told him I could speak to snakes. Which of course you know, " Harry chimes mockingly, "how everyone reacted when they found out I could. Especially when a certain someone spread around that it was I, who was the heir of Slytherin."

"I… I, Potter, you put me on spot. "

Harry laughs, holding Draco's escaping hands. "No, you put me in a spotlight and alienated the most alien child. "

Harry had felt like he was not the same bundle of bones everyone else was made of. Who could blame him for seeing only what he wanted to see? Who could accuse him of anything? He loved everything that did not love him back; it was the easiest thing in the world. Back then perhaps, he believed in change. He believed scaffolding was the same as structure, he thought he could build it.

"Then it was third year. "

"And then indeed was third year", Harry affirms closing his eyes. He sank and settled on the waves of memories, the sea drumming in his ear.

Harry stands in Lupin's classroom for his practical exam, wand at arms, waiting for the Boggart, ready to cast the Patronus, preparing for Lily's scream.

He waits and waits and out steps Tom. Coiffed hair, pale cheeks, high brows. Harry feels the beginning of a lump in his throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

“ ** _You love me_ ,**” he smiles so softly.

Harry had carved his name into his own sides, Tom was calling to him softly, gently, the golden boy wondered if anyone was ever paying attention.

Harry loses his form, his is a giant ball of loneliness strolling through an ever greater one. He closes his eyes, from love, from hate. He feels like he has a hole in the middle of his chest.

“ ** _You do, don’t you, golden boy?_** " the voice is closer, lovelier. " ** _You love the man who killed your parents._** ”

Harry does not know to whom he owes his biggest apology? He knows Tom did not lie. He knows no one has been crueler than he has been to himself. His eyes shake with the weight of unshed tears. You’re my home, Tom, Do you not understand?

“Ridiculous”

Harry sees the concern in Lupin’s eyes and murmur of other students and he knows that he took too long, he knows he will not do well.

“Harry-”

“I am okay”

Draco whistles, “so that was the Dark Lord? Well, I.. I am starting to stop blaming you for your… er thing… crush?”

“I will let the mortification of whatever you just said set in.” Harry laughs.

“And I thought you flunked that test for good, Potter.”

“Did you really believe the boy who lived will actually flunk DADA?”

Harry is surprised to see Draco lay his hand around his shoulder, but the warmth of a new blooming, perhaps wilting of a new friendship protects the death-bound boys from the Tower’s chilly air.

“Then I am there, stranded in an old graveyard,” the stench of death still claws at his neck. “I see Wormtail taking the blade back to resurrect Voldemort.”

Draco is more silent than death.

“It is a spectacle.” Harry reminiscences.

The wound can have, should only have, just one proper name. Harry recognizes that he loves him, Tom, by this: he is left with a wound he does not want to replace.

“Then suddenly-,” Harry is looking at the back of the man’s shoulder. Voldemort, risen from the dead, looks like he has conquered death himself. His soul dyes itself with the colour of his myriad thoughts. Fear, passion, anxiety is muddled up like splatters of paint on a canvas.

“I was afraid,” Harry continues swallowing,” I was afraid to die there, I was to look at the risen man and stare into the eyes of my Tom.”

Draco pulls him closer.

Harry closes his eyes and Tom’s eyes stare back at him. Mocking, condescending, familiar, loving.

“And...you saw him again, didn’t you? In the Ministry? “

“He had possessed me, you know, or at least perhaps that’s what he was going for,” he breathes, he remembers what it felt like to be more than skin and bones. Harry had felt what it was like to be underwater, the lure of nonexistence. Harry takes in a deep breath.

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I, uh, don’t really know what happened and I don’t think Voldemort knew either, I think... I don’t know what happened in the past year, but he isn’t insane anymore.”

“Seemed pretty fucking insane and angry to me,” scoffed Draco.

“I saw him without his glamour. I felt him. He seemed shocked, uh, I felt his shock. His glamour dropped, he looked like himself when he was younger.”

“I am sure you did, you know, feel him” Draco wiggles his eyebrows.

“Shut the fuck up Malfoy,” warmth blooms in Harry’s heart, he knows Draco is trifling with the mood to mitigate the saddened atmosphere. Harry realizes he should have perhaps shook his hands with Malfoy in first year. Ron has never quite lent him his empathy unless asked for.

“He wears a glamour, huh, to ward off my aunt and her sorts eh?”

“Why would his glamour ward off Bellatrix?”

“Um, I do not know if you have noticed it, Potter, he looks repulsive, not for the sorts of you, who would want to still snog that face.”

“Shut up, Malfoy.”

“Misprise me causeth I speaketh the sooth. “ he sighs dramatically, “You really want to snog that face don’t you- ouch” he wheezes, “I am trying to be a nice pal here, man.”

“Well, welcome to the friendship then. '' Harry mumbles out trying to avoid the blond looking at him get so flustered.

“So, when?”

“Hm?”

“When are you getting it done?”

“What?”

“The ritual to remove the flowers. When are you getting it done? ”

Harry takes a sharp intake of breath, “I'm not.”

“What?” Draco sputters out.

“I am not going to get the ritual done, Draco.”

“What? Are you fucking with me right now Potter?”

Draco has removed his hand and holds onto his shoulders, almost as if to shake him out of his reverie.

“No. ” His words are firm. He has this answer ingrained in his existence like some sort of lingering happiness. He has repressed love, repressed himself, swallowed every possible forgotten hope of depth-dark sobbing.

His life hangs precariously, he knows, like the moon hangs over the earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

“You will- “ Draco’s voice breaks, “but, I don’t understand, you will die.”

“The war is coming, Draco, don’t you see? I don’t have much time to live anyway. ”

No human being has ever stood closer to his soul than Tom, Harry knows, even if there was not a war, he would have chosen death. Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that Harry can not love without trembling.

Harry looks up to see sympathy in Draco’s eyes. Not disbelief. He says nothing for a time. He then runs his fingers through the blond hair before ruffling it affectionately and pulling Draco for a hug.

The war is near.

A teardrop stains Draco’s shirt.

He knows Draco too will die.

“Well, now we know, you should take to a date where you ask him not to kill you? Get him a bouquet of flowers maybe? ” Draco mumbles into his shoulder making him scoff.

“Now, that somehow is the smartest idea you both daft cows could come up with?” Hermione’s snarkiest of voices shakes both the boys up,” Giving you-know-who FLOWERS?” she whispers shouts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Another chapter is done! More Harry, Draco, and Hermione interaction coming in the next chapter! Hope you all like it. Thank you so much for all the kudos and comments!
> 
> P. S. We thrive on kudos. Please leave them there to make us feel validated.


	11. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> music recommendation: https://youtu.be/506k3_V4z7o
> 
> enjoy the heartwarming pain.  
>  -Hamletluvr69
> 
> p.s. there is a very slight mention of non-con.

“ _ Granger?” _

The boys gasp out of their embrace, and Harry feels like has been stupefied.

“How long were you listening?” Draco recovers quicker.

“Harry.” She calls his name, pained and distraught, and they all know she has been here long enough to know everything.

“Harry” she repeats falling to her knees in front of him, as a sob breaks through her. “Why didn’t you tell me,” she hiccups, “why did you not tell me about everything?”

There is a frenzy in her motion as she picks up his hand and placing her cheeks on his hand, staining it with her tears, “ Have I not been a friend to you, Harry? Am I a bad person to overlook all these?”

Harry is too guilty to look up. He does not speak.

“Enough, Granger. Stop it”

“Do not tell me what to do, Malfoy. This isn’t between us-”

“Hermione-” Harry’s soft voice breaks through her venom as he gathers her in his arms, and let her cry her agony out.

The pain he did not say, does not say out loud, has built a home inside of him, and Harry realizes how he has shut Hermione out, and how much he hurt her.

“I am sorry, I’m here,” he mumbles into her ear as he calms her down.

“Here, take these.” Draco offers her a silk handkerchief, sitting down beside them.

“Go on Hermione, Lord Malfoy is giving you his handkerchief, oh look, it has his initials too. ”

“Oh fuck off, Potter.” but that does bring a small smile to her face as she rubs at her nose.

“Thank you.”

“Civility looks good on you, Grang- ouch.”

“Do not test me, Malfoy, ” snickers Hermione, jabbing her wand a bit harder at the Blond’s throat. 

"Now isn't this nostalgic." Draco covers his nose on instinct. 

Harry would have felt so warm to see a blooming friendship if he was not trying to stop a coughing fit. Harry has a thousand skins and they have become the person he is today. He condemns the man, yet his heart yearns towards Tom. 

A coughing fit seizes him, Tom and him are closer than friends, They are enemies linked together, the same soul binds them, now flowers grow in the saddest part of him.  He knows no end of desiring Tom, notwithstanding of this love brings him death.  His throat constricts, he can not breathe, there is blood everywhere and he is lost in it. He breathes blood, not air. He keeps loving, his heart has no pity on him. 

He clutches his palms over his mouth and coughs out a flower. An entire flower. A first.  It is a beautiful flower and Harry is relieved to have given into destruction.  It is bright red with blood, with agony, Astonishingly red, there is so much brightness inside him.  Mechanically he puts the flower aside and brings his hands inside his pocket to bring out the potion bottle he carries around.  He takes a swig and a sob breaks him out of his reverie. He had forgotten about Draco and Hermione altogether. He stares at dumb silence as Hermione sobs holding his arm and Draco stares at him with glassy eyes.

“Er… it is the blood- replenishing potion that I am...uh... used to carrying.” 

_ “Oh Harry!” _ she bemoaned. Hermione has never looked this heart-wrenching. 

“Here, use this handkerchief, you have blood on your mouth.”

“Just how many of them do you carry around? ” His joke falls on dead ears.

“How long, Harry?” Hermione rasps out, “How long have you been hiding this? ”

“Longer than I can remember,” he smiles faintly.

“Oh, darling.” This time, Hermione brings him to her embrace, warm and protective. Harry will think of apologizing to her later for ruining her shirt with tears, blood, and some snot.

“Don’t you want to live?”

“There is nothing left for me here, Mione. I never thought I'd live this long anyway.”

“What do you mean?” Draco’s voice is harsh with emotion.

“The war… without the condition, without this,” Harry picks up the flower, “the war is too near Draco,” smiling weakly he says, “and I am the golden boy.” He sighs, “If the war was not to kill me, the Dursleys would have.”

“What? Your kins back in London?  _ Kill you, Harry? _ ” Hermione is astonished. 

“I- uh,”

“No more hiding, Harry,” her hands strengthened on his shoulder, “no more hiding, please tell us… everything.”

Harry takes a deep breath, remembering how for the longest time he thought his name was Freak Potter Boy. “I came to know about my real name in elementary school,” he chuckles, “from a teacher. I remember correcting her, I asked her to call me a freak,” Harry answers Draco’s confusion before he could ask, “you see, that is what they used to call me, I thought it was my name.”

Hermione holds his hand tighter.

“I, well I-, they would leave me to starve,” he shudders,, his stomach cramping from ghost pain making him unconsciously caress his stomach, “ you know, any mistake, anything I did they did not like, they would put me, you know,” his breath becomes jagged, “they would lock...lock me up in the cupboard,” he smiles, reminiscing, “that was my room, where I lived till the Hogwarts letter reached me, it was this tiny,” he shows with his hands, “they would lock me up there, with no food.”

“Oh, Harry.”

“Potter, uh, Harry, I- I uh, did not know that you were going through all these,” Draco’s face looks ashen, “I have been such a wanker to you.” 

“No one knew Draco, I’ve never mentioned this to anyone, well, other than Dumbledore that is. At Least you did not leave bruises on my ribs as Dudley did, “ Harry smiles up at him, making him flinch.

Hermione falls into his arms, crying profusely, “I am so sorry, Harry. I have been so observant.”

Patting her at the back, he rests his chin over her head, “It’s okay, Mione, you did not know. Well, then Hogwarts happened, I chased death to the third-floor corridor as you surely know, and we did not die, or worse expelled, ” he jokes, trying to lighten the mood only to be punched by Hermione in the gut, “hey ouch-.”

“For once in her entire life, Granger has done something I can agree with.” before he can smile with superiority, he finds himself flung down.

“Well, I have been practicing wandless magic.” comes a smug reply.

“Do not kill each other off both of you. If you want to give me your ears, then don’t be kids.”

“Mature Potter. ” mocks Draco.

“Well, then I went back to the Dursleys after Madame Pomfrey treated me so kindly, unlike a said Slytherin, and...and ” Harry feels a wave of suppressed horror rush through his spine, worse than hunger, worse than all the hurt Dudley inflicted on him. He remembers the sky crying along with him that day. Phantom memories come back still to haunt him. He had opened up to the top and the diary pages had bled:  _ I understand, I know.  _ Harry had heard thunders and remembered Tom there on. He had thought that Tom had always wanted storms, even when the earth below his feet were beginning to crack.  Harry had found himself a home in the eye of one such storm.  Harry understood what it is to break and blighted pain to seep in. Tom had always glowed with the halo of a dying star. There is no kind way to tell their stories.

_ He closes his eyes and is in an older room. Affluence. Aristocracy. Alienation. There is a clack of heels which distract Harry to turn his side. The room is familiar, the faces unknown except one. Professor Slughorn is there, much younger, with a tailored suit and a deceptively kind face, coming towards him. Panic creeps up his throat. Harry can not differentiate memories from ghosts but he knows who he will see when he turns to a mirror. Coiffed hair, a sharp jaw, and eyes that kill winds and beg for blood. _

_ “My dear, Tom. I see you wore the robe I bought you.” _

_ “Yes, professor.”  A thin stretch of bone burns within him as Slughorn runs his hand up and down him, pulling him closer, the stench of alcohol filling up his senses. _

_ “You are my prized possession, are you not my boy. I trust you to pass on my education. You shall be my little Horcrux.”  _

“Harry, HARRY-”

“Yeah, uh, what?’

“You spaced out, mate.”

“Harry did you… did you see another vision?”

“Slughorn...it was Slughorn!” He whispers shouts his revelation into existence.

“Huh?” 

“I don’t, I don’t know”

Harry shakes himself off the pain. He can’t bring those memories back. He’s suffered through that horror once and doesn’t want to live through it again. This time he shared his pain. He now knows Tom has always empathized with him, for his sympathy had felt a bit too personal. “So, uh what was I saying? Yeah, the Dursleys, and um, I was back to that house. But this time it was a room, well, more like a cage.”

Draco looks more and more green, he looks like he is going to be sick.

“Hermione, come here, do not feel so guilt-”

“I could not-, I should have insisted-”

“Shh, it was not that bad, they didn’t beat me up all the time, and I, uh, got better at stealing food and-”

“Harry you were  _ abused _ .” 

“I mean, Dumbledore knew all about it and did not do anything, and insisted I should go back, so I am pretty sure it was not that bad-”

“Child abuse is punishable by a sentence to Askaban, Potter.”

“Dumbledore knew about it?”

“He insisted I go back. Said there were blood wards that would always protect me from Voldemort.”

“‘Protect you from Voldemort,’” Hermione seethes, “how? By killing you themselves before Voldemort can?”

“Hermione, calm down-”

“She is right to be angry, Potter, that old man raised you to be a lamb to the slaughter”

“And what is that you mentioned about Horcruxes, Harry?” Hermione enquires stiffening both the boys instantly. 

“Come, Granger, do you train your cat to listen around, or is it just you?” Draco hesitantly tries to humour away from the question.

“It’s okay, Draco. I-, Hermione, do you, do you know what a Horcrux is?”

“No.”

“For a change, Granger,” sniggers the blond, “how must I put is...It is essentially a vessel for a fractured soul.”

“Fractured...soul?”

“Yes. Well,  a Horcrux is the word used for an object in which a person has concealed part of their soul... Well, you split your soul, you see, and hide part of it in an object outside the body. Then, even if one's body is attacked or destroyed, one cannot die, for part of the soul remains earthbound and undamaged. "

“That’s-”

“Yeah,  Horcruxes can only be created after committing murder, the supreme act of, you know, evil.” Draco flays his hands, “The process for the creation of a Horcrux involves a spell ,” his voice goes cold,” and a horrific act is to be performed soon after the murder has been committed.”

The only sound that accompanies them is the hushed whispers of the Whomping Willow.

“Given that Horcruxes are precious to those who make them, there are usually protective measures made to prevent them from being stolen or destroyed, by the kinds of Counter-Charms  and curses .” Draco with moonlight in his hair looks the part of the sinister magic as he continues, “ Horcrux making is considered to be a volatile art and the most terrible of all soul magic . The nature and concepts of Horcruxes are so brutal, they are kept secret from most of the wizarding world , and very few people are ever made aware of their nature.”

“Such as your father and yourself? ”

“Such as my father and not so myself, yes.”

“How do you know so much?”

“My father forbade me from going into a certain section of our library.”

“And you did  _ just _ that?”

“Well, obviously.”

“So,” Hermione speaks up again, testing her words, “Voldemort has made a Horcrux.”

“Plural. Horcruxes.” Harry asserts. “I’ve destroyed one in second year, do you recall? It was the diary.”

“You mean you destroyed the container?” Draco questions, stunning shock lacing his voice.

“Erm, well,” he scratches his nape, “I did destroy it. Dumbledore mentioned it himself.”

“You destroyed the  _ vessel _ , Harry. It is not possible to destroy the soul contained in it. It is out there somewhere, fraying. That is what was mentioned in the book; the soul is indestructible.”

“Then, “ Harry pauses to form the question, “how then can one destroy someone who has a Horcrux?”

“You destroy all of them. All the vessels.”

A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing, he remembers reading. It is not like a mother’s womb, it will not bleed, it will not make room. Harry has no room as well. Dumbledore’s betrayal sways him like poison. He stumbles back. He feels like a haunted house. He does not possess himself. He is being built up to be torn down.

“I do understand the awe the Dark Lord gathered.” Draco muses.

“How can you even say such a thing, Malfoy?” Hermione’s eyes are cold, harsh.

“The man has fractured his soul, Granger, into Merlin knows how many vessels, and  _ yet _ look at him. Look at his wrath, look at his power. You must agree that demands awe.” 

“I do not understand.”

“When you commit a murder, your soul incurs damages, you are then to use a spell to encase that part of the soul into a vessel. With every fracture, with the creation of every new vessel, a part of his soul, his abilities, his magic was left behind.”

  
  


Harry too has been enamored by the Dark Lord’s power. The wizarding world had portrayed Voldemort as some sort of a worn-out stock character, villainized him without giving him virtues, and stole him of his humaneness. After meeting him, falling in love with him, and being terrified of him Harry understood why he had so many followers, why people worshiped him, and above all is scared of him. He remembers how ethereal Voldemort looked when he was commanding his Death Eaters, his magic had a certain sense of allure that could enthrall anyone. 

“His memories too. ” Harry confirms “I am not the only one who survived a killing curse, Mione. It was him too. With his fractured soul he resurrected himself, he deserved the awe. There is no good or bad, there is only power...” 

“- And those too weak to seek it.” Draco finishes “My father repeats it. How did…”

“Tom, erm...Voldemort in the first year.” Harry’s cheeks burn, “I just… I have heard a lot about him. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” parrots both his friends, teasing. 

“I did not come across the fact that Horcruxes share memories, Potter; it also could be that I am wrong given I did not read everything.”

“How can you  _ not _ read everything?”

Draco purses his already thin lips, “I got caught, Granger. My father had them hidden.”

“I have his memories.” Harry’s words come out of him, surprising himself.

“What?” splutters Draco.

“I have his memories,” Harry clears his throat, “His early life in the orphanage-”

_ “Orphanage?”  _ Draco shouts out in shock.

“Shhh...” Hermione puts her index on the blond boy’s lips, to hush him up like a child. Harry smiles at the glasslike absurdity of the situation of three friends making a truce over their fate that herald death.

“His...his memories of his childhood,” Harry remembers the fragility of their shared memories as he looked through Tom’s waiting world, he tries to understand its secret shades,” his time in Hogwarts...”

“What memories?” Draco’s curiosity frazzles on his skin.

“They are not mine to tell.” Harry has seen how Tom has burnt, how he froze, how he turned rigid and forgot softness because it never served him. 

“I can speak parseltongue,” Harry looks out of the tower, “just like his other Horcrux, I have his memories, and when I sleep, when I dream, I see him, I  _ am  _ him.” How could have Harry dared to have stopped his soul from touching Tom’s?

“Harry...you...”

The needle dark night smells of revulsion, regret, and remorse.

“Harry you are a Horcrux.”

“Voldemort did not mean to make me one.”

When can Harry say _ his _ name, Harry wonders, and have it mean only his name and not what was left behind?

“That does not erase the fact that you are one. Professor Dumbledore, and _ Dumbledore…,”  _ she splutters, “he…” She can not seem to finish her string of words.

“He knows,” Harry confirms.

“How?” Harry gets stunned by the iciness of her voice, “How  _ dare _ he?”

Her rage burns stronger than Tom’s malice. She has shaking fists and trembling teeth. She is bewildered and wary and Harry sees how a brick on her wall falls. Sees her lose faith in authority. He had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hid at the heart of anything he loved. Acceptance came easy to him.

“He is,” Hermione shakes with molten rage,” He is rearing you like a lamb to the slaughter.”

“It really is not-”

“Don’t,” Draco finally speaks out, voice hoarse like sandpaper, “Granger is right. There is no excuse.”

“Do NOT excuse that man, Harry? HOW CAN HE DO THIS?” Her face is red from rage, “HOW CAN HE EXPECT A MERE SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY TO BE THE FIGUREHEAD OF A WAR?”

Harry and Draco physically withdraw to give her molten anger the space it carves out.

“You are  _ sixteen _ , Harry. You know that right? Huh, making a _sixteen-year-old_ a pawn on his grand scheme of chess.” Angry tears roll down her cheeks,” First he leaves you to be  _ abused, in spite of knowing what a bunch of psychopaths your wards are,  _ AND NOW HE IS SETTING YOU UP FOR DEATH? 

Harry has always sat alone with his grief. Mothered it. Held its small hot hand. He has been sore from this grief like he has returned from a run like he was training for a marathon. His grief had whispered sweet nothings. And now Hermione, Draco sits beside him. He feels warm, warm, warm.

Hope.

Love blows at his ears, tickling him.

“Harry,” suddenly Hermione screams out ecstatically, “HARRY.” Her laughter ricochets off the walls. Draco looks at her like he has been outmaneuvered like he is playing a forgotten inside role of some Pinteresque play.

“Don’t you see the silver lining?” Her tower chilled hands grasp at his shoulder and shake him, “You are his  _ Horcrux  _ Harry. That must, MUST mean something to him? You are precious to him Harry, don’t you see?”

He finds himself reeling, cold wind prickles at his skin. It feels like it will rain outside, and it feels like the rain will feel like love, like hope.

“You...you want me to join him?” Harry is increduled. 

“Not quite, but you can bargain with him.”

“Have you lost it, Granger!” Draco is astounded, ”You want Potter to bargain with  _ the Dark Lord _ when the said  _ someone  _ has been trying to kill the other his entire life! Poured yourself a pint or two of that fire whiskey, did you? Care to share?”

“Dumbledore has been raising Harry for slaughter.” Hermione is quick as a cat, sharper than a knife.

“At Least  _ You-know-who _ will be invested in keeping Harry alive for his own sake!” 

“But...but what about the war?”

“What about it?” Her chin up in defiance.

“Won’t I,” he cleanses his constricting throat, so as not to choke on the bile that rose up, “Won’t I be betraying everyone? Won’t I be betraying my parents?” His voice cracks, “ Betraying what my parents and Sirius stood for? Gave their lives up for? Won’t I be betraying you and every muggle-born Hermione?”

Guilt feels like a lake with no bottom and Harry seems to be mouth deep in it, feet searching for ground.

“You are more important to me than the war, Harry. You are too important to me that I will let you walk to your own death.” Her voice is framed strong with her love.

Hermione looks up at Harry, framed against the torrid night, warm, warm with love, cradling his arms between hers.

“You are my best friend Harry.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leave us kudos and comments!
> 
> the next update might be a little late, exams are killing me and my back.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! We are posting our first multi-chaptered fic! This is a WIP and we are going to start updating it in March once we have most of the fic written! We'll update the tags as we upload new chapters!
> 
> Please leave hyper-specific comments and kudos. It makes us feel validated.


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